How To Create The First Website

Everybody knows how to use a computer or how to browse the web. And everybody knows how to create simple documents with Word or similar office tools. Unfortunately most of the web users have no idea about what is needed to run a website or how to make one. In general, creating a website requires some knowledge of web technologies, design, HTML, CSS, servers, hosting and other technical terms. Maybe this is the reason why not everybody using internet and browsing the web has its own homepage. The truth is that to create some simple pages you need no technical knowledge. You only need to know that if you can browse the web and search for pages then you can also create them.

The first possibility is to use one of the free services where you can create a blog or a simple homepage. Use Google and search for free blog or free website. You will find many websites offering everything for free. All you have to do is to create an account, select a template and you are ready to write about your favorite topics. This is the best way to learn about the web, internet technologies, internet marketing, search engines, search engine optimization and other topics related to websites. Sooner or later you will find that this free blog or homepage is limited. Maybe you would like to have your own domain or you will find that you are limited with features or website design. The next step is to make a complete website from scratch. Again, you need no special technical knowledge or design talent.

In principle, for the first experiments you need some popular and well supported content management system (CMS) and hosting on your home computer. The later is simpler than most people think. You simply install one of the packages like WampServer or EasyPHP. This will install Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP support which are needed to run a typical CMS. The next step is choosing between Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal content management systems. A web CMS is a complete system to create and manage a website. Wordpress is more oriented toward blogs and is simple for beginners, Joomla is universal but needs more learning and Drupal is also universal and recommended for advanced users. Spend some time to read reviews about those systems and select one that fits your needs.

Since you have installed a hosting environment on your computer you only need to unpack the CMS archive file at the WWW folder and after initial installation steps your new website is already working with the default settings. Now you can explore the world of content management systems and start customizing your first website.

By: Jan Pascal

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

The author also went through this process of learning web technologies. His favorite CMS is Joomla and the recordingstudiosoftware.net/ website is one of his latest projects about music recording software. Joomla is a fantastic content management system--there are thousands of templates and extensions available.