There are many ways to create a website or blog. Creating a website is not a difficult task now a days. You can create any type of websites with in a few minutes.
In this article, I will explain how to build a website from scratch from scratch. How can you create a website or blog your self very easily with in minutes and hours.
What You Need Before Creating A Website ?
There are two ways to create and menage a website. A third party hosted website or self-hosted website.
Hosted websites: For example, you can create a website/blog with in few minutes by using wordpress.com, blogger.com and other services. Third part service host your blog or website. It is very simple and easy to create a website or blog.
Self Hosted websites/blogs: If you want full control over your website or blog, you can create and set up a website or blog yourself. This is not very simple and easy. Technical knowledge is required to set up website.
In this article, I will discuss how to create a self hosted website.
Web Hosting : Domain Name and Web Space
If you want to create a self hosted website the first thing is Web Hosting (Domain Name and Web Space).
In simple words, Domain name is a address of your website. For example Google.com is a domain name of Google.
While web space is some online storage where you will save files (Web pages, CMS’s, Pictures, Videos etc) of your web site.
If you don’t have a domain name and web space you can buy it from namecheap.com. They offer different hosting plans but for a beginner a basic hosting plan will be enough.
Different Types of Web Hosting
Web Hosting Companies offers different types of web hosting plans. Such as shared hosting, reseller hosting, virtual servers and dedicated servers.
Shared hosting is most popular and cost-effective option and generally works good. If you host a very popular website you might need a dedicated server but as a beginner Shared hosting plan is a good option. On shared hosting your website is hosted with some other customers websites.
You can not host next Facebook or Amazon on a shared hosting but its normally perfect to host a website that receives 30,000 visitors/month.
Reseller Web Hosting lets you run your own web hosting company. You can sell hosting packages under your own name.
Dedicated Server is your own web server at the hosting company’s data center. Dedicated servers performs much faster than shared hosting. On dedicated servers only your websites are stored. dedicated servers are much expensive than shared hosting.
Virtual Private Servers are between two extremes of shared hosting and dedicated servers. Also known as VPS or Virtual Private Server. VPS is more powerful than shared hosting & you have more control over your VPS.
which hosting package should you go for?
As a beginner or to host a single website shared hosting is perfectly adequate. If you decide to host multiple website for different projects at a later date, you will be able to upgrade to a dedicated or a virtual private servers.
So start with shared hosting and upgrade later when necessary.
After buying web hosting next step is to create website. Now you can create and publish web pages your self or you can install a Content Management System such as WordPress to run your website.
Here is more detail.
Different Methods: how to build a website from scratch ?
There are many ways to create a website. Here is a list of these methods and I will give you more detail about these methods later.
- Create Website With Content Management System (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc)
- Create Website with Site Builders (BuilderEngine, SquareSpace, WIX etc)
- Create Website Yourself with HTML, CSS and PHP (or other programming languages)
- Create blogs with Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com
1. Creating Web Sites with Content Management Systems (CMS’s)
If you want to create website with in a few minutes or hours, You should choose CMS to create a website.
Creating websites with CMS’s are the simplest, easiest and fastest way. Just download a CMS and install it on your web hosting space and with in a few minutes your website will be up and running.
It is not necessary to download and install CMS, There are many companies which allows you to set up a website with CMS with few clicks.
I was very excited when I came to know about CMS’s and I created my first website with WordPress (Most Popular CMS to create websites).
There are hundreds of CMS’s out there. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are most popular and widely used Content management Systems to create websites.
What Kind Of Website You Can Create With CMS’s ?
You can create any type of website with CMS’s. You can create a blog where you publish some content/articles online or you create a photo gallery to publish images.
You can even create advance websites like FaceBook using Content Management Systems. BussyPress is very popular and powerful free plugin to create a social networking website like FaceBook with WordPress.
If you want additional features for your CMS base website, Free and Commercial plug ins and modules are available to achieve your desired functionality.
2. Creating Websites with Site builder
The second way to create a working site is to use a site creation tools that lets you use drag-and-drop, and point-and-click features.
Site creation tools are designed to work on lots of different web pages that are linked together to form a website. You can easily edit multiple web pages at once.
For example, if you have a website of many pages and you create a new page and want to put a link on all existing web pages, you can easily do that.
For more details, You should read Choose a website builder: 14 top tools at creativeBloq.com
3. Creating Web Pages yourself with HTML & CSS.
3rd method is to create and publish websites yourself. With HTML and CSS you can create simple websites with few pages. But you can not create and manage advance websites with hundred or thousands of pages very easily.
It is not easy to manage static websites with hundreds of pages. While Content Managements Systems such as WordPress makes it very simple and easy to manage large websites.
A web page is simply a file written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and publishing web pages means transferring web pages from your computer to a Web Server via FTP, so people all over the world will be able to view them.
Note : FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP client allow you to transfer files from your PC to your web hosting space.
FileZilla is a free FTP client that you can use to transfer your web pages and other files from PC to web server.
To create simple web pages yourself you should know HTML & CSS. HTML stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
HTML5 is latest version of HTML. It is not a standard but you can use many of HTML5 features right now.
HTML is a computer language used to build web pages while CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet used to style web pages, CSS3 is the latest version of CSS you can use many of its features right now.
You can start creating simple web pages with HTML and CSS & later use Database techniques with PHP & MySQL. With this method, you can make your website do anything you want. So just start off with HTML and CSS and later learn to create advance websites with PHP and MySQL.
4. Create blogs with Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com
Starting a blog is very simple and easy. Blogger, wordpress.com and Tumblr makes it very simple and easy to start free blogs. You can publish images, videos and content very easily. You can even buy a custom domain name for your blogs.
Do you really need to learn HTML and CSS or PHP to Build Websites?
The question is that if you can create websites with site creation tools and Content Management Systems, Do you need to learn HTML and CSS or other languages.
You don’t necessarily need any knowledge of HTML, CSS or PHP to create a website with CMS’s and site creation tools, you just need to know how to use these site creation tools or how to use CMS’s.
As a beginner you can start creating websites with CMS;s like WordPress. It is very easy to learn and use WordPress. You can create simple and advance websites quickly and very easily.
Why You Should Learn HTML and CSS or PHP ?
There are different advantages to learn HTML and CSS, PHP and other languages. You will be more familiar what HTML, CSS, PHP and other languages can do and can’t do and you will be able to fix the problem when they occur.
You will have the ability to work on your website yourself from any computer. You will be able to add or remove any functionality from you CMS based website that you like.
HTML, CSS and PHP files can be edited with notepad and other free Code Editors. You don’t need expensive software’s to create/edit these files, but no doubt HTML, CSS and PHP editors make your workflow faster, simple and easy.
Resources to Learn HTML, CSS and WordPress?
Even if you choose CMS’s to create Website even then you should learn HTML, CSS and PHP. It is very important if you want to customize your websites yourself and also very simple and easy to understand.
There are some great online resources online where you can learn HTML and CSS. Here is a list of recommended online resources.
HTML Tutorials
HTML Beginner Tutorial Pdf Download: Creating First Webpage
HTML For Beginner : Code Editors, Headings & Paragraphs
HTML For Beginner : Adding Links And Images
1. 30 Days to Learn HTML and CSS (Free Video Course)
It is free video course by Jeffery Way from NetTuts. Just watch and learn 1 video a day and after 30 days you will be able to create Web pages with HTML and CSS.
Watch 30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS (Full Course) by Envato
WordPress Tutorials
WPbeginner has published hundreds of videos at their youtube channel. You can learn how to use WordPress with their free video tutorials.
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