Starting A Website

A few years ago I didn't know the first thing about how to start a website; I thought that you needed to either know how to program in HTML or pay someone a large sum of money to build a site for you. Neither of these points is correct but if you know a little about programming then that can be a help. Of course if you have money to burn then you can pay someone to build you a site and if you don't like it then you can pay them to do it again. Not really a practical way to go. Luckily as the World Wide Web has grown and aged it is now possible for anyone with a little patience to put together a small website in an afternoon.

Blogging

A blog which as I am sure you have heard of, is like a website but normally looked after by one person and is updated on a regular basis. The actual name blog has come from name web and log and has become increasingly popular over the last 10 years, to the point now where a good percentage of the websites built today are based on a blogging platform. Blogs can also be interactive with their readers by allowing them to leave comments and opinions on the original article. The great thing about most blog platforms today is that they are very easy to set up and are normally free. Anyone looking into starting a website should look no further than word press to build their site on. It is so easy to use, to set up and there is literally thousands of plugins designed to make life even easier for you, some will take care of things like the SEO of our page layouts others will automatically create site maps for us every time we post new content to let Google know about the changes.



Word Press

Ok before I overwhelm you with information on plugins and all the wonderful things they can do, let's have a look at the first steps involved in setting up our first word press site.

1. Head on over to wordpress.com and hit the 'Get Started Here' button. The first thing you will be asked for is to create a blog address. Before we do anything here I just want to go over a few things on domain names, blog addresses, website names or whatever you know them as. The official technical term is 'Domain name' and that is the address that you put in to your browser like [http://myblog.com] or [http://www.Myblog.com] etc. Now what I'm about to share with you can have a huge influence on search engine optimization and it should one of the first things you learn about in basics of SEO. E M D stands for Exact Match Domain, and what does this mean? Let's say that your site is about inflatable dart boards, when someone searches for 'inflatable dart boards' ideally you want your site to be on the first page of the search results. If you purchase the name inflatabledartboards.com then just because you have the keyword (search term) in your domain name then you will already have a head start in SEO. Many of the most popular E M D's are gone but there is ways of getting around that. Fortunately today we are going to keep things simple and use word press own domain names as these are free and there is plenty left to choose from, this is because they end in, .wordpress.com and not just.com, so it would be inflatabledartboards.wordpress.com. Before you choose your blog name, put your SEO hat on and take your time to think of what you want your site to found for. There are many different way to come up with a name which include market research and keyword analyses, but this is a whole other ball game.

2. Enter your chosen domain name in, then choose a username and password, enter your email address. Before you press the 'Create your blog' button open up word pad and copy and paste all the details in there and save it somewhere where you can find it. This is important and a habit I recommend that you start doing now. Keep a record of everything you do, all your passwords and website names.

3. Ok once you have done that press the 'create your blog' button and then head on over to your email and confirm the account.

4. Well done you have just created your first website. Easy

5. If you want to see what it look like then at the top left hand side you should see the word press logo a blue little circle with W in it and your site name next to it. Click that your first site will open up.
Well I bet you didn't think it would be that easy.