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.