Building a Website in an Evening

If you’re any kind of programmer or web developer then you’ve almost certainly been asked “how much would it cost to create my own website?”. For an experienced programmer or web designer, creating a simple website is no big deal, but most people have no idea how to create a website, and find every aspect of the process confusing and intimidating.

So, if you’re reading this, you may have asked me about building a website at a party and been told to visit this URL.

Building a Website in Three Steps — to a normal person, a “website” is an address, such as “pets.com”, that when you type it into your browser’s address bar causes stuff to appear. For this magic to happen, you need to own a domain name (the address), and have a computer somewhere with the right software and files on it somewhere (the “web server”), and have the address point at that computer.

To create a website you need to:

  1. register a domain name (the address)
  2. pick a hosting provider (to provide the web server)
  3. point the domain name to the web server
  4. put your files (e.g. web pages and associated images) in the folder, or (easier) use some kind of one-click package installer to make your life easier

Starting Up – To begin with you can go to any domain registrar and simply try to figure out if a domain name you like is available (you may need to try several; the best domain names are short, easy to say, easy to remember, and easy to type — these days this usually means a made-up word like “flickr” or “bing”). Just think of names, type them in, and see if they’re available.

With a good hosting provider, setting up a website doesn’t need to be much harder than making a purchase from Amazon… the first time.

Design/Usability – One important thing to consider as you get into the design phase of setting up your own website is: what will it be like for a visitor to use your website? If you have video content, for example, is it simple to find and easy to play? Is it located properly on the site so that it is relevant to its context and makes sense? This is just one example, but overall it is extremely important, if you want to generate a large amount of web traffic and keep people coming back to your site, to make your site as “usable” as possible.

Need a good usability reference? There’s a website for that (and amazingly it’s a government website). I’ve linked to what amounts to a free book on usability which combines recommendations with the evidence backing them up.

Probably the simplest option is to use some kind of package to manage your website for you. There are all kinds of options, from simply pointing your shiny new domain name at a service like Tumblr, to using “one click installs” on some hosting providers. These packages make maintaining a website about as easy as dealing with gmail or flickr.

Indeed, you can go to Tumblr right now, make a site, and see if you like it. If you do, you can buy a domain name and point it at your account and you are good to go. If not, you spent nothing except a few minutes.

Cost — you might think that creating your own website is expensive. Typically, you can obtain a domain name (that’s the address for your website, e.g. “myfabuloussite.com”) for well under $20 per year, and host the website (i.e. pay someone to keep your website available online at the address you got) for under $10/month. Some of the services I mentioned, like Tumblr, are free — so you can have a pretty nice website for, effectively, under $20/year. Obviously, this is more expensive than, say, having a facebook page (which is free), but with your own website you own the address and the content and control the user experience.

The best way to figure these things out is to simply to try them. It only costs a few hours to create a website, even with no technical knowledge at all. And adding your own domain name only costs a few dollars.