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Tutorial - Making your first website

Making your first website can be a daunting task and your first website could be built for many different purposes; you will be able to make a personal website around yourself where you may like to post family photographs that you would like to share with friends and family, or you may have the need to build a business website that is going to enable to sell products or services online. Your first website could just simply be to promote your business online. Numerous people would enjoy being able to create their own first website, but don’t necessarily have the knowledge or knowhow required to do so; though there are numerous web-based products which lay claim to being able to help you build your first website, they don’t necessarily allow you customise your first website as much as you want since your are restricted to certain templates. For this reason you should learn how to build your first website from scratch with hypertext mark-up language also known as HTML.

Learning the Languages of HTM,HTML & CSS

To make the most basic of websites you are going to require to familirie yourself with HTML and CSS. HTML is the primary language of all web pages - without HTML you won’t even be capable of createing or editing one page. CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ and is the language applied to style elements on a web page - you need to know this if you want to make your web pages look good. If you would like to expand the features of your first website to include something dynamic, for example a shopping cart then you'll need to learn a server side internet language such as PHP or ASP.

There are many resources on the internet that you can use to learn web languages, including:

  • http://www.w3schools.com - This web site features tutorials for languages which are widely applied on the World Wide Web. This resource if perfect to bring you from being a beginner to having a very good understanding of internet languages.
  • http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/ - Is a website that has many a different articles, tutorials and code illustrations which can aid you to learn ASP.NET, and its older sister - classic ASP.
  • http://uk3.php.net/tut.php - PHP.net - the home site of the PHP scripting language has assemble a simple tutorial to help out beginners.

Once you've learnt the basics of hypertext markup language and cascading style sheets, you're almost ready to start building your first website.

Selecting the Design Software to Make Your First Website

When building making your first website you need to decide what software you'll be using to make it. Whilst deciding what web design software package you will be using, there are numerous variables that you ought always take into consideration, these are: price of the software package, the complexness of the package and whether you're going to build your first website using your own code or by using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor program. Website design software packages can range from free to around £500; if you're going to be building your web site using your own code then you have no need for a WYSIWYG editor meaning that all you require is a text application, such as Microsoft Notepad or jEdit - a piece of software specifically built for this sort of scenario. If you're after a piece of software which you would like to do all the coding for you and that lets you see the final outcome without having to do anything complicated then you want a piece of software which is known as a ‘WYSIWYG’ editor; these software package generally cost some dollars, and examples of WYSIWYG editors include NetObject’s Fusion and Adobe’s Dreamweaver. WYSIWYG editors are in general more complicated to use than normal text editors since they've more built in features to assist someone along with the building of their web site. Listed below are some of the most commonly used website design programs:

  • http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/Default.aspx - Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition is a free piece of Microsoft software created to encourage more developers and designers alike to take up ASP.NET coding. It can be used as both a WYSIWYG editor and a plain text editor, and has many features built in.
  • http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/default.aspx - Microsoft Visual Studio is VWD’s bigger brother and it’s costs vary since there are various different editions of it.
  • http://www.jedit.net/ - jEdit is a free plain text editor that was created specifically for web designers. You can use it to script in any language, but it doesn’t come with a WYSIWYG editor.
  • http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/ - Adobe Dreamweaver (formally Macromedia Dreamweaver) is probably the best known piece of website design software throughout the world. It comes with both a code editor and a WYSIWYG editor.

Getting Your First website onto the Internet

Getting your first website onto the World Wide Web does not have to be the complicated operation that many make it out to be. All you need to do is purchase a domain name and website hosting and you're all set to go. A domain name is the address which you type in to go to an internet site - the cost of these is relatively low as you can pick a domain up relativly cheaply these days; web hosting also is comparatively cheap. After you have purchased both of these you will be given access to an internet system known as a ‘control panel’ where you are able to control all aspects of your first website and its hosting.

To upload your first website to your web space all you need to do is establish an FTP connection with the FTP server for your site (normally ftp://ftp.yourdomain.com). You'll be asked to log-in with your FTP account details - these can ordinarily be made through your control panel. Once a connection has been established you have to copy your first website files into the root of your first website, this is a folder normally named ‘public_html’ under Linux hosting or ‘httpdocs’ if you're on a Windows based hosting package.

Once the files have been uploaded, all you need to do is open anew browser window, type your domain name into the address bar and your first website should appear like magic!

Promoting Your First Website

You have got your first website completed and on the internet. The next thing to arrange is to get your first website promoted in order that you can start having visitors. You will be able to submit your first website online directories under a category that fits your website and sign up to online advertising services so that your first website will be promoted on other websites; you should also be sure that your first website is listed in the results of popular search engines for example: MSN, Google, and Yahoo - this will ensure that your first website receives visitors. You should find the links below helpful when promoting your website:
http://www.google.com/adwords/ - Google AdWords is Google’s advertiser network which is known as a PPC (pay per click) program where you can create your own adverts for your website which will be then shown on the websites of Google publisher’s.
http://www.url-free.net/ - This is a prime example of a website directory where you can submit your website to a certain category where it can then be found by others who are browsing the category.

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