How to Build Your Website With Ease

Introduction

So, you want to create a website? Than this page is the right place for you. I'm going to try to explain how you can easily create your own website online.

There is very little you need to build a website and everything you need is available free on the Internet. In other words, you don't need to spend huge sums of money purchasing expensive software packages, programming manuals or web server space. You just need to know where to start.

There are many CMS (Content Management Systems) out there, but most of them are quite difficult to use. Joomla, Wordpress and others, are powerful open source CMS, but quite hard to use. I will however go into them in another article, because these are better for more advanced websites.

Here is a list of what you do need:

• basic computer skills
• access to a personal computer
• access to the Internet

There are five steps involved in publishing a page. They are:

• define your objectives
• get a web hosting account
• construct your site
• promote your website
• track your hits and fine tune

Define your objectives

There are many good reasons for building a web page but it is important that your goals are clear. Your objectives should drive the content and the design of your site. Many people build home pages as a hobby, purely for their own personal development. Others build them to promote business, social, cultural, humanitarian, or business objectives.

Knowledge of web page development can help you in your career. Many businesses today have their own corporate Intranet sites, which are simply internal Internet systems used to share corporate information. The ability to communicate electronically is a valuable skill to employers.

To define your objectives, try to answer following questions:

• What do I want to do with my website?
• Who do I want to reach?
• How can I reach these goals?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can start creating a website.

Create a web hosting account

Next you need to create a web hosting account. For this tutorial I create a web hosting account on www.xsonline.eu.

We order a hosting account using this software, but we select the option "easy site" at "type of hosting". It asks you a few questions like your doman name, how much disk space you will need and some personal information.

After you filled it out it will ask you to select a payment method. You canchoose "Paypal" or "Bank transfer" As soon as they receive your payment, your hosting will be activated. When you use Paypal, your hosting will be active in a few minutes.

Construct your site

You will get an email with the login information for your site control panel. Now you need to login to your website control panel and create a user account:

You do this by surfing to http://www.yourdomain.com/

Wen you created your page, you will be asked to choose a design from the list. This will be a starter for your site. You can also choose a design from another site you like. Just enter the url of your choice, and it will be installed on your site.

Now you selected your design, you can start filling up the data, or modifying the design. You get a lot of options to edit the information on your website. Now in a few minutes, you can have your website online.

This page has some tools like text editing, adding objects,  and so on. You should be just fine using it. It's rather easy.

Promote your website

Now the hard part starts. You need to get visitors on your site. If you followed the guide above, your website is already optimized for search engines, but you will still need to thell them it exists.

One way to do this is by adding your site to google using this page. This procedure will take some time. In my experience, it usually takes google about 14 days to index your website.

Now you have indexed your page, google has given your site a really low ranking, and your site will not be easily found on the web. Search engines have a lot of parameters on which they decide what value a page has on a certain keyword. I will try to explain a portion of how to optimize your site.

First you need to spread your links. The more links you have to your website on the web, the better your site will score in general. Try to get your site listed on relevant sites. For example, if you have a restaurant, try to get listed on restaurant directories.

Search engines, google for example, look for keywords in the content of your site. It does this by looking for words in bold, titles, underlined text and so on. So try to put some words in bold, and choose the titles of your pages wisely

Should you use paid marketing?

If you have a website for commercial purposes, it might be a good choice to pay for marketing. I try to show you some successful ways of to market your website/products online.

Google adwords: If you wish to get traffic from people who are searching for certain keywords, google adwords is a good way to start. However, this might be a quite expensive way of marketing your products, as many people surfing the web are not looking to actually buy your product.

Lead generators: There are agencies that specialize in providing qualified leads to businesses. The process of lead generation is actually very easy. An agency develops a website or partnerships with several websites in which they promote and advertise your product or service. A consumer finds these directories or informational sites and they are able to complete an online quote request form. This form is submitted to the agency. The buyers information is verified and matched to the appropriate providers. These matched leads are then sent via email to the prospective providers with full contact information and purchasing requirements.

Opt-in Mailing list: Many people believe that their main marketing tool is their web site. In fact, your main marketing tool is your opt-in mailing list. A web site is just a way of building your mailing list - by collecting the email addresses of your visitors.