How to Start a Web Site

A question we get a lot is, "How do I start a web site?" There are actually several steps that go into creating a brand new site and introducing it to your audience, so the simplest answer is, "Hire us to make one for you"! But you may be able to save money by doing some or all of the steps yourself, so we've written this guide to help you through the process.

There are six steps to go through for nearly any site:

  1. Choose and purchase a domain name
  2. Purchase web hosting
  3. Install any needed software packages
  4. Create a design for the site
  5. Create content
  6. Market the site to attract visitors

Choose and purchase a domain name

This is the easiest part of the task, but also the most permanent, so you'll want to take your time and make sure you're happy with your choice. If you choose a domain name and then decide after five years that it's lame and you want to change it, it won't be any fun. You're sure to lose your search engine ranking for weeks or months, and you'll have to hire a programmer to move things and redirect the traffic from old to new. So take your time and come up with a domain you can live with for as long as you expect to have this web site.

Contrary to some popular notions, it's not necessary to have your "keywords" in the domain name. After all, the most popular search engine isn't at searchengine.com, it's google.com. The most popular social networking site isn't socialnetwork.com or friendster.com, it's facebook.com. You get the idea. If your site is in a very specific niche and you don't expect word-of-mouth marketing, a keyword-based domain is fine, like porsche911parts.com for your site that sells Porsche 911 parts. But if your site is useful to people, they'll remember the domain name and pass it around as long as it's simple enough. So consider the possibility of a short, catchy name like Yahoo, if you can think of one—especially if the obvious keyword-based domains are already taken, which is often the case.

GoDaddy Domain Search

When you're brainstorming domains, there are many places you can go to look them up and see if they're available. We use GoDaddy.com for most of our domain registrations, and you can look domains up there to see if they're available. If a domain is available (no one has registered it yet), it will typically cost $10-15/year.

If a domain is taken (someone already owns it), you'll get a response like this:

GoDaddy Domain Taken

If you really want that particular domain, it may be possible to buy it. If you'd like GoDaddy to do the legwork for you, you can click on the Domain Buy link there, and they'll contact the owner and try to negotiate the purchase—for a substantial fee. Alternatively, you can try to arrange the purchase yourself. The Get info link in the image above will show you the registration information for the domain, including the contact information for the people in charge of it. Contact them at the email addresses or phone numbers listed there, and see if you can work out a price you're both happy with.

Purchase web hosting

Now that you have a domain, you need a place to host it. There are thousands of hosting companies and plans out there, ranging in price from free to nearly free to expensive, depending on what's included. It may be wise to get an experienced webmaster to help you with this part. You need to make sure the hosting plan meets the requirements of any software you plan to use. For instance, to run a Wordpress blog, the plan must provide the PHP language and a MySQL database. If you need a secure connection for processing credit cards, the plan must support an SSL certificate. And so on.

The cheapest hosting plans are generally at the big companies, but I prefer to stick with local ones as much as possible. They may cost a few more dollars per month, but I can get someone I know on the phone there in case of emergency, and they're more likely to work with me if I need something unusual.

Install any needed software packages

Now your domain is being hosted, but there's nothing there to see yet, so it's time to create something. In almost all cases today, the first step will be to install some sort of CMS (Content Management System). This is a piece of software that takes care of a lot of the underlying details of page creation for you, so you don't have to create every page of your web site from scratch the way we did ten years ago. Once you have a CMS installed, you can create new pages simply by writing the new content, usually in a nice editor, and the CMS will take care of the rest for you. A CMS like Wordpress or Drupal, or an e-commerce-specific one like Zen Cart, makes adding and updating text, photos, and other content easy.

Some hosting services offer control panels that will let you install a CMS on your site with a few clicks, so you can get one up and running quickly. They typically have many settings and optional features, though, so you may need an experienced webmaster to help you get everything installed and configured the way you want it.

If your site starts out as a two-page site, a CMS may seem like overkill, but it's still a good idea to use one right from the start. That way, when you decide a few months later that you'd like to add a photo gallery or calendar or blog, it can be as simple as dropping a new module into place or switching on that feature, rather than installing something completely new and trying to make it match what you already have in design and navigation.

Create a design for your site

A CMS also makes the process of design easier. Instead of designing each page individually, you create (or hire someone to create) a theme, which the CMS applies to all pages. This saves tons of work and helps your site look consistent.

If you're using a popular CMS, there are many free and inexpensive design themes you can choose from, if you're not particularly concerned about having something unique. On the other hand, you could hire a designer to create a completely original theme, which would be the most expensive option. Somewhere in the middle would be to pick a free one that comes close to what you like, and have a designer modify it to your needs.

Create content

The content is the real meat of your site. The shiniest design in the world won't bring you much traffic if your site doesn't have something useful to offer. Your content might be informational articles, funny stories, photos, videos, products for sale, or any number of other things. Whatever your content is, that's what's going to draw people (and search engines, which drive much of the traffic) to your site.

So the more quality content you have, the better. If you're starting a recipe site, don't just include the bare recipes. Write detailed instructions for how to make things, or reviews of the recipes. Include a photo journal or video of the food being prepared. If your site is an online catalog of fishing lures, make sure you have good pictures of them, and write detailed descriptions that go farther than the "3-inch bass lure" you'll see on many sites and in print catalogs. Write interesting descriptions, and maybe have some side articles about selecting lures for particular weather and fishing combinations.

Always remember that content is king. Think about what needs or questions people in your niche have, and try to answer those. You can't ever have too much content, as long as it's all potentially useful or interesting to someone.

Market the site to attract visitors

This is the most complex step of all, because there are many different ways to market a web site. Just a sampling:

  • Submit the site to search engines.
  • Submit the site to large directories and niche directories.
  • Write personally to site owners in related fields and ask them to link to you.
  • Do keyword research for your market, and incorporate the best keywords into your content.
  • Purchase pay-per-click advertising on other sites.
  • Develop a social networking presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook, and post useful links to your site there.
  • Write articles related to your content and submit them to article databases.
  • Participate in blog comments, forums, and places like Yahoo Answers when discussions there relate to your site, and establish yourself as a quality resource in the field (with a link to your site in your signature).
  • If you sell products, create an Ebay store where you continually sell at least one product, so people who see it can click through to your real store for the rest of your products.
  • Print advertising of your domain on business cards, letterhead, bulletin boards, or anywhere your audience might see it.

Those are just some of the top methods, but there are many more. Most of these require time but not a lot of expertise, so you may want to have a site marketing plan written up by an expert, with the understanding that you will be doing all or most of the work yourself. See our SEO/SEM FAQ for more information on marketing your site.

Odds and Ends

That covers the primary steps you need to take to get your web site started, established, and marketed to your audience. But there are a few extra details you may want to have:

An email address at your own domain.
An email address like info@mydomain.com looks a lot more professional than some_guy_95678@att.net. Also, since you own the domain, you can be pretty sure you'll have that email address as long as you want it, which may not be the case with an address at your Internet provider. Most hosting plans come with several email address you can set up and forward to your personal address.
Traffic Analysis
A free service like Google Analytics will keep track of all human traffic to your site, where it comes from, the words people searched for in search engines when they found you, and more. This can be very helpful in seeing what parts of your content are most popular, what you might want to expand, and what you might want to begin offering that you don't already.
Site backups
Some hosting services do regular backups, but not all do, and we prefer to have our own backups as well. Since the content of most CMS-driven sites is saved in a database, that's an extra layer of complexity if a database gets corrupted or a disk dies and things have to be rebuilt. We do regular backups of our sites to our own servers, so even if a hosting service were to disappear like a thief in the night, we could recreate our sites somewhere else with a minimum of loss.