How To Start Your Own Website or Blog?

This website is all about building websites! We focus on beginners, but there will be tutorials and tips for experienced bloggers and webmasters as well. We provide free guidance in all aspects of web development, right from scratch. For faster understanding and easy navigation, we have labelled the four stages in building a successful website in the menu itself.  You may navigate through the links in the menu for an overview.

Step 1 : Start —> Step 2 : Design—> Step 3 : Optimize —>Step 4 : Monetize.

Starting a Website vs Building a Website!

Yes, there is difference between starting a website and building a website. It may take only a few minutes to start a website, but to build a successful website it may take months and at times, years.

What we are trying to say is, it is easy to start a website. But just by starting a website, you cannot sit back relaxed. You need to build your website. It is a daily exercise, and this is the area where real effort has to come. A website is often comparable our own children. Just like a child who needs nutrition and nourishment to grow, your website also needs inputs from you to grow and flourish. Once started, you need to add a lot of content and features to it, optimize it in search engines, fix errors in code, share in social media etc. to make your website popular among visitors. If properly managed, your website may earn you a handsome income, at times big enough to leave your primary job and take blogging as a career.

Usual Questions regarding starting a website

  1. How to start a website?
  2. Why should I need a website?
  3. What is the difference between a website and blog?
  4. What exactly is a blog? What is WordPress and Blogger?
  5. How much it will cost me to start a website?
  6. How can I make money online?

There are a hundred other questions too; all questions will be answered in this website. As of now, let’s focus to the heading : How To Start Your Own Website or Blog? Don’t worry if you are new to web designing. We won’t go technical in the beginning. We would try our best to make things look simple. In-fact many areas of website design and administration are simple. There are thousands of examples from school kids to those in eighties who successfully create and run websites. To cut it short, starting and building a website is not a Herculean task.

How to start a website?

As we hinted in the beginning, starting a website is a not a long process, but to build a quality website, it will take time. Having said that, let’s focus on steps to get your website start rolling. Though there are sub-steps inside it, let’s group all steps into one and call it by a name “Step 1 : Basics“.

Step 1 [Start] : Basic steps to start your website rolling

  1. Plan your website – Understand your requirements and think beyond the future.
  2. Domain Registration – Find a good domain name for your website or blog.
  3. Web Hosting – Find a reliable host which satisfies your website requirements.

Yes, these are the only 3 sub-steps to start a new website. Sounds easy, right? Only an overview is provided in this post, we have not explained about how to register a domain or how to host your website. These details about each sub-stages are included in the link Step 1 : Basics.

Having learned how to start a website, now let us look at what you need to do to build the website.

Step 2 [Design] : Deciding on the design and content of website

As you already have registered your website name (Eg: www.example.com) and hosted it in a web-server (Eg: BlueHost), now it’s time to add content to your blank website. But before that you need to decide on the design and structure of it. Sub-areas to be handled under Step 2 [Design] are the following.

  1. Do you need a website or blog? – Understand the difference.
  2. What are the technologies you would like to use? HTML, CSS and  JavaScript being some of the web technologies, which all should you use in your website? Referring some web design tutorials to learn HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP.net, WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal based on your requirements will certainly help at this stage.
  3. Prepare a Web Design – A layout on paper with details like columns, navigation etc.
  4. Code the design, if it is a website. If it is a blog, adjust your theme and make customization according to your design.
  5. Start adding the content. Remember, Content is the King.

Read to know more about the sub-stages in Step 2 in the link : Step 2 : Design.

Step 3 [Optimize] – Website Optimization and Maintenance

Under step 3, you need to work on the optimization aspect of the website for better visibility and performance. Areas to focus include are listed below.

  1. Search Engine Optimization. Is your website doing good in Search Engine Results?
  2. Social Media Marketing. Start Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus pages for your website.
  3. Analyze your website using Web Monitoring Tools.
  4. Optimize your website. Perform Speed optimization and Database Optimization.
  5. Backup your website.
  6. Know how to upgrade your website or blog.
  7. Enhance the security features of your website.

Read to know more about the sub-stages in Step 3 in the link : Step 3 : Optimize.

Step 4 [Monetize] : Make Money From Websites and other advanced actions

Once you have stable and optimized website popular among masses, you can try making money online. There are different ways of earning income from websites including selling products or services or displaying ads. One of the most popular advertising network is Google’s Adsense. These steps are handled in detailed in Step 4 [Monetize].

  1. Make Money Online From Website – Try ads / sell products or services.
  2. Incorporate new technologies into your website – PHP, MySQL etc.
  3. Develop Web Applications – Make your website a Web Application.

Read to know more about the sub-stages in Step 4 in the link : Step 4 : Monetize.