Spira International

How to Set Up a Web Site for Beginners

OK, you've been web surfing for quite a while now and now it's time you think you need to set up a web site for your business - But HOW? All of those techie sites sound like Greek to you? Alphabet soup got you down? HTML? XHTML? CSS? ASP? PHP? Flash? Javascript? Joomla? Ruby on Rails? What is all of that and do I really need to know all of that? In a nutshell, No, You don't need to know all of those details, just yet. This article should give you a better idea of just how to get a website done and up.

The first thing you need to do is to acquire an Internet name, you know a dot com, like mybusiness.com. This is called a URL, short for Uniform Resource Locator. There are other potential suffixes you can use .org, .net, .tv, .biz, etc and if you're not in the US, you can get country specific suffixes, such as .mx for Mexico, .de for Germany, .jp for Japan, etc. For most commercial sites a .com suffix is most desirable, because people will probably not remember .biz of some other suffix. If you're some kind of organization, .org is preferred. This has to be unique - no two identical names are allowed, so you need to do a little research first. One easy way to check if your desired name is available is to use a whois site such as http://www.whois.net/.

Next you need to find someone to host your site. There are thousands of companies offering web site hosting. The one I like best is Lunar Pages. They offer unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth (data transfer) unlimited number of e-mail addresses (yourname@yourcompany.com) free URL registration and a whole lot of extras and is only $5 per month. There's a link to Lunar Pages on my site in the lower right of this page: http://www.spiraengineering.com/hp_webd.html.

Next, you need a template to build your site with. I strongly recommend an XHTML CSS template. Sorry, I had to throw in a little alphabet soup. It stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language with Cascading Style Sheets in case you're interested, but that's not important now. That is the most modern of the available templates and the one that the search engines can index most easily. There are many places to download free templates, but here are several that have a nice variety:

http://freecssxhtmltemplates.com/
http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html
http://www.free-css-templates.com/

Next all you just need to do is put your information into the template. You can open the index file using notepad (included with Windows.) If you open a window with the web site template (just double click on the index.html file in the listing) and another window with the code open in Notepad, you can make a change to the code, save it, then just hit reload (or refresh) in the browser window to see your work. It will take you very little time to figure out how the web site code is organized.

If you want to change the pictures in the web site to your own, it, also is relatively simple. You'll need a picture editing program. Google offers an excellent one for free called Picasa http://picasa.google.com/. http://picasa.google.com/ You'll need to crop and size your pictures to the same size as those on the template for best results. Again, as you modify the pictures, and add them to the template, you just need to hit reload to see how your work looks on the web site.

Now that you have a URL, have a web hosting service, and have a web site you like, all you need to do is upload it to the Internet. For this you'll need a file transfer protocol (FTP) program. An excellent one is Filezilla, and it also may be downloaded absolutely free here: http://filezilla-project.org/. You want the client version. This makes uploading your web site simple.

That's all it takes. Give it a try. It's surprisingly easy to claim your own space on the web.

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