Basic Requirements To Build Your First Website

Basic Requirements To Build Your First Website
10th December 2007
Author: Tim Tye

It is both a joy as well as a huge challenge putting up a website for the first time in your life. Nevertheless, the experience can be exceedingly rewarding as well as fun.

I am one of the lucky few who can claim to earn a living full time from my websites. I am frequently asked how I do it, especially from people who have never built a website. Today, I want to share with you the key ingredients you need. I hope the pointers I provide will get you on the way.

If you intend to earn serious, long-time income from websites, my first advise to you, first of all, is to get your own domain name. Do not have your website hosted under someone else’s domain. You only benefit him, not yourself.

If you were to ask me, what are the tools you need to build a great website, I can count them with the fingers of one hand. You can probably bypass knowing any of the tools by hiring a web programmer to build your website for you, but that is hardly the way to do things, if you are serious about earning an income from the web. Although you do not need to know programming in detail, you need to have some basic web knowledge in order to build your own website. Without that, you are like a captain of a ship who cannot tell stern from starboard.

The first item you need to build your website is a HTML Editor. A HTML Editor is a software application for you to write the web pages. You can use a WYSIWYG software that shows you exactly how your webpage will appear. However, I encourage you to learn a bit of coding, as it will come in handy when you are ready to optimize your website.
There are several brand of HTML Editor in the market, including Microsoft Frontpage, Dreamweaver and so on. Find one that you can use comfortably.

The second item you need is knowledge of HTML Codes.
HTML Codes are instructions to tell the Internet how to display or format your pages. Get a book or get someone to teach you. Go on the web and search for a free tutorial. The basic HTML codes you need to know are:
• Title
• Body
• Head
• Html
• Headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Bold
• Italic
• Underline
• Hyperlink
• Table
In addition to the above, it would do you good to learn how to format size and color of your font, background, border. More advanced features such as CSS would be helpful too, but are still all together very easy, that even a dummy could learn it (so if you have to, find a book for dummies and learn all about it).

The third item to build your website is a Domain Name.
As mentioned earlier, you should get your own domain name. The domain name, also called the hostname or site name, will be your web presence. It is your brand. To use your website to earn an income, I would suggest you go for a “dot com” domain name. It is the most popular, hence, the most difficult to get.

You probably will not get the first domain name of your choice, and will need to try a few times before landing on one that is still available. This is a very important exercise, so take all the time you need.

Registering and keeping a domain name will cost you approximately US$10 per year or even lower. That is peanuts if you can earn the amount back. When you register a domain, choose a name that is descriptive. As far as possible, avoid using proper names – i.e. your own personal name, your child’s name, etc – unless you happen to be a celebrity, such a domain name is simply meaningless to visitors. To drive quick traffic into your web, try to get a domain name that reflects the activity of your website.


The fourth item for your website is Web hosting.
Web hosting is space that you rent on a server to host your website. You do not need to purchase a server - you don't even need to know how a server works. The web hosting company usually takes care of the technical details for you, and provide you a web-based control panel to upload your pages.

What's the difference between domain name and web hosting? Think of web hosting as a safe deposit box, and the domain name as the safe deposit box number. When you register for web hosting, you are buying space in a safe deposit box. The amount you pay should determine the amount of space you need. For that reason, the web hosting fee is directly related to the amount of space you purchase. The safe deposit box number remains the same, regardless the amount of space you use. In a similar sense, the fee for domain name is fixed regardless the amount of content you have on the web.

When you start your website, the amount of space you need will most likely be pretty low, less than 1GB, so do not pay for a lot of space that you are not going to use. You can always buy more space as your needs grow. If you pay for 5GB per year, and throughout the course of that year, you never use more than 1GB, then the balance 4GB is money wasted.

The fifth and final item you need is an FTP Software. An FTP Software is an application that enables you to transfer data from your computer to your website on the Internet, and vice versa. Some web hosting companies allow you to upload directly to their server using the web, but FTP software is usually speedier than the web option.
The FTP Software allows you to upload new pages to your website as well as update existing pages.

Now that I have listed out the five essential tools, I want you to get familiar with it before we go any further. Choose a domain name and register it. Quite often, web hosting companies allow you to register domains for free, or at a low price, if you get the hosting from them. In addition, acquire a HTML Editor – some can be found on the web and you can try it out for free over a time period. Sign up for a HTML tutorial or get one direct from the web.

In a future article – assuming you have put together a website – we will look at how we can make a profit from the web. It is a very exciting subject. I hope you have enjoyed reading this article and would look forward to the next one.

Timothy Tye started earning from the web four years ago. He enjoys it tremendously and has written many articles teaching people to earn from the web. These articles are available at http://www.happyjoblessguy.com.

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