There are some main ingredients and some optional parts to getting a website up and running. This article will discuss what you absolutely need for internet users to actually find you on the world wide web. Main components are having a domain name and web hosting for your files, the actual physical files like HTML, that make up the design of the page and the option to secure your content against non encrypted attacks. Let’s take a look.
Registering a Domain Name
When starting up your website, you need a domain name to help people remember how to get to your site. A memorable domain name is something like google.com, which everyone knows. When starting out, you may want to look into some companies offering you to purchase cheap domain names to start your web business. Their features are quite similar to the bigger companies, if not the same, and are a great cost effective solution.
Web Site Hosting
You need a location to store your web site files. If you have an image, a PDF file or flash presentation, for others to see it, there has to be a location always ready to show those files. This is where an affordable web hosting solution comes into play. For a relatively inexpensive price of less than five to ten dollars a month you can get your web files hosted for others to see.
Web Site Design
The web site is comprised of files, including HTML files, Image files, Videos or Flash. A web developer can create this for you or you will do it yourself. The better the skills of the person doing it, the better your site will look like. You can use tools like Dreamweaver or other web hosting sitebuilders to create your site. Again, quality is directly in relation to the tools used and skill level of the person doing it.
Secure Hosting (Optional)
Many sites use a brochure style setup with static data, so the need for optional secured hosting is not a requirement. If your site is collecting information such as credit card data, then you will need to looking into buying ssl certificate for your website to ensure your visitors data is protected. The data is protected by a web server certificate that changes your site from http to https, indicating to the user it is secure. The https is what makes the data encrypted when sent over the internet so people cannot abuse the information being transmitted. For these sites, you definately need it, but not for regular information web sites or blogs.
Those are four basics you need to start any web site and will get you started. You then need to decide what additional components you may need to also include in your web site package.