Domain names
Once you have chosen the material to be put on your website, your next step will be to find a suitable name to your website. For instance, a personal website can have your name, a business website can have your company's or product category's name to it. The name of the website should be relevant to the content which exists in it.
The name of a particular website is assigned as a domain name. Example of domain names are yahoo.com, msn.com, linux.org, vsnl.net. There are loads of website offering you free subdomains. You can choose <yourname>.<theirdomain>.com. Subdomain names are generally long , so I will suggest you to go for Top level Domain name for more exposure and flexibility. Believe it or not, but a personal or business domain can do more wonders than a free subdomain.
How to go about getting a domain?
There are many websites that offer Domain registration services. You have to register your domain with a domain Registrar (or a reseller). You can get a .com starting from $8 upwards. It is better to register your domain with a registrar that gives you DNS services as well. For a few dollars more (actually, twice or thrice the amount) you can also get webhosting for free with domain registration.
If you are a newbie and trying to setup your first website, I would highly recommend to first approach a free subdomain hosting provider. Once you understand the basics, you will be much surer when you start building your website with domain. ( I purchased my domain after 20 months of trying free subdomain hosting. I changed over 5 webhosts until I realised that a domain is a must. )
DNS Services
Domain Name Server is a server where all queries to your domain will point to. So if you did not get free DNS with your domain registration then you will have to look for DNS provider. There is no need to panic as there are lots of free DNS providers as well. Zoneedit.com is the best free DNS provider I have come across. There are few others. These services have email forwarders, web address redirects. That means you may host your website with free subdomain provider (or your ISP) and whenever there is a request for www.<yourdomain>.com, it will be redirected to <you>.<host>.com. You will have to add the nameserver information to your registrar member account control panel.
Finding Webhosts
This is the place where your website will be actually hosted. Your webpages will be present in the webservers of the webspace providers often called as 'Webhosts'. There are many websites offering webspace for nothing. Websites like freeservers, netfirms, geocities place an ad banner on the pages of the websites served. So if you are using frames in your website, it will be a problem as multiple banner ads would interfere with the page design.
There are a few websites that have pop-up ads, text ads and even ads-free for FREE!
Uploading
Once you have created your website on your computer and done with registering your domain and finding a webhost, you are ready to publish it on the web. Your webhost may give you FTP access or web access i.e. manually selecting each file and uploading it. Always, select the webhost that provides FTP access as it is faster to upload and less tideous. If you get web-based file-manager also, then it is a bonus.
For virtual domain hosting, note that the remote folder should be set to public_html. Whenever a request to www.<yourdomain>.com is received, the webserver searches the index file in the public_html (sometimes www) directory. FTP programs required to upload webpages are available for free, many HTML editors are now equipped with FTP access facility.
Scripts
Find out all the scrpts that your webhost provides you. If you would like to receive emails/feedback from your visitors by setting up an online form, you can use CGI scripts like formmail or cgiemail. This requires that your webhost gives you cgi-bin folder. If you have PHP and MySQL enabled, then you can choose from a wide variety of scripts like Bulletin boards, photo galleries, support tickets, Mailing lists, shopping carts to put on your website.
Free tools
If your webhost does not provide a script you would like to put, don't worry, there are websites that offer remote hosting. The scipts are located on their webpages (generally along with their ads) which are customizable to suit your needs. Few examples are Bravenet.com, Cgispy.com and HotPlugins.com. Many plugin tools are available like chat, ecards, mailing lists, bulletin boards. You can also have search box from various search engine providers for free. Google goes a step ahead and offers customized results page for free.
For virtual domain hosting, all your email needs will be satisfied by them. Starting from pop mails, email forwarding, aliases to autoresponders, filters and webmail facilities. For others, you will have to rely on DNS providers for email forwards. There are few services that offer email at your domain for free (everyone.net, bigmailbox.com), others charge a few dollars.
Promotion
Now, that you are ready with your website, you will have to promote your website. First thing to do is submit your website to search engines. There are paid as well as free submissions. Google, Open Directory Project have strict no-pay inclusions. It may take about a month for the search engine spider to crawl your website. Search engines generally look at Meta Tags and the text in a web page to deliver search results, so be specific in your Metatags and content. Also, always provide ALT tags to images - this is helpful for image search.
There are also programs where you can exchange links for free with a website of similar interest as yours. If you have a business website, and if you are going to profit from it then you can advertise your website on the web by paying a few bucks.
Hope, you benifited from the above tips. So what are you waiting for? Take a dive in this world wide web.
I really appreciate all the great tips!!
