Knowing how to make a website is a skill that is becoming more and more useful. Back in the day, you’d need to know some HTML to put up just a simple website. Fiddling with tags and remember to close them can be a headache if you’re just starting out. A very basic website would involve something like this:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Basically, for every tag “<>” you open, you need to then close it “</>”. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. In fact, you could create a local site on your computer by opening a text file, writing the code, then saving it as an HTML file. This is how I actually got started learning to build a website years ago. It would take me forever just to put up something very simple. Fortunately, learning how to make a website today involves almost no coding knowledge whatsoever.
What You Will Need
- Domain
- Hosting
- WordPress
Domain
The domain is the URL that you see for every website you visit such as this site: tipps.org
You can get domains at many sites such as Godaddy.com and Namecheap.com. Godaddy almost always has coupons that you can use. You can find the coupons at the following site: livecodes.blogspot.com
You will be paying under $10 a year for the domain.
The name you choose for your domain will depend on what you plan on using the website for. If it’s just a personal website, then any name will do. If it’s for a specific purpose like to make money selling a product, then ideally, you want some word in the domain that relates to that product. This isn’t necessary but it will help in terms of ranking in the search engines.
Hosting
You’ll need hosting to put your website on. Your domain will point to your hosting which is basically a server that will store all of your website’s files. Companies like Hostgator are among the top rated. You’ll need to buy your domain before you get hosting for the first time.
Hosting will cost about $10 a month but you can host unlimited domains on 1 hosting account.
Connecting Your Domain and Your Hosting
Once you have your domain, you’ll need to change the nameserver address to point at your hosting company. When you buy a hosting account, you will be emailed the nameserver addresses. There will be 2 of them.
Here’s a video to guide you through this process.
Setting Up Your Website
Once you have your hosting account, you can install WordPress on it. WordPress is a platform that makes creating a website extremely simple. Here’s a video to show you how to do that. During this process, you will be asked to create a username and password for your site. Make sure you use a secure password and remember it.
Once that’s all set up, you can now log into your website by going to yoursite.com/wp-login (replace ‘yoursite.com’ with whatever you site’s domain is of course.)
You’ll be using the login info you created when you installed WordPress. Once you enter your site’s admin section, you can click on “Appearances”, then “themes”, then “install themes” at the top. From here, you can search for different types of themes and install them onto your website or you can just use the default theme that comes with WordPress.
Creating Posts
To create a post, just click on “Posts” on the left hand site of your WordPress admin and click on “add new”. From there, just type away.
As you can see, learning how to make a website is easy now that you have the power of the WordPress platform. Anyone can make a really nice looking site without knowing any code. Now if you want to customize your site’s look, then some coding knowledge may be necessary.
There are tons of tutorials online that will teach you how to customize certain things.