Beginning Your First Website
An often-asked question when people start to build their site is "Where do I begin?"
The true answer to this question is "You've already started."
The first part of building a website is to think about what it is that you want to put on the Internet.
This opens up further questions, such as:
- What should I call my website?
- What sort of people will want to visit?
- What's in it for the visitor?
- How can I make sure that my visitors keep coming back for more?
These are all questions you should ask yourself, and answer carefully.
Then, I recommend that you check to see if your preferred domain name is available - and if it is, buy it straight away! You don't have to buy any hosting at this point, you can always get that later - but make sure that nobody else buys your domain name before you do!
After that, it may help to sketch out your website on paper before you sit down at a computer. Questions to ask yourself while you do this:
- What sort of colours should I use?
- How many pages, or sections, should my site have?
- How are my visitors going to move between the sections? Should the links to them be on the left, or across the top, or somewhere else?
- How should I lay out my pages? Should I have the text on the left, some pictures on the right?
After you've got a rough idea of what you're going to do, it'd be a good time to buy some hosting. Once you've got your hosting account, you can have a play around with the tools that come with it to find out what else your website can do.
Then, it'd be a good idea to either learn some website building programming languages, or download some software, which is covered in this question.
