HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN WEBSITE / IMAGE GALLERY |
|---|
| STEP 1: CHOOSE A DOMAIN NAME |
|---|
|
First of all, you need a domain name.
The most popular are the general ones like .COM , .NET , .ORG , .INFO or
.BIZ. Everyone can register these names without any restrictions. There
is no standard price for domain names. Prices very between 7 and 36 Dollar
per year. One of the cheapest reliable places to register domain names is
GoDaddy.com: Some webhosters offer free or discounted domain registrations with their hosting packages. If you choose this option, be aware that if you want to move you site to another hosting company your domain registration stops too. |
| STEP 2: CHOOSE A HOSTING COMPANY (WEBHOSTERS) TO HOST YOUR WEBSITE |
|---|
|
There are thousands of companies offering hosting for your website / homepage. Here are some basic features you need to take into account if you want compare and choose a webhoster for your website.
Disk space: The amount
of disk space you need depends on the mega bytes (MB) of
the files you upload and the size of your email accounts.
You need also some disk space for log files + web statistics
that are automatically created in your account. Most webhosters
offer more diskspace than you ever need.
Data transfer: Data transfer is the measure of the traffic generated from your website. Data transfer is measured in bytes, kilo bytes (KB), mega bytes (MB) or giga bytes (GB). About 80% of websites on the internet uses less than 5 GB of data transfer per month. An average website uses less than 250MB of data transfer per month and receives about 50 visitors per day. Websites with image galleries use more data transfer than is a regular ones, but seldom more than 2 or 3GB per month. Only very popular sites exceed 30GB data transfer per month (This one uses an everage of 35GB per month). This is how you calculate data transfer: Visitors x Page size (html+images) x Page views (number of pages) x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer. Your email traffic is also counted as data traffic.Uptime: This is the time your website is available on the internet. 99,9% Is the most common level offered. 100% Uptime is impossible since all webhosters have to perform maintenance on their servers ones in a while and technical difficulties can occur. Most large webhosters have back-up servers and back-up internet connections (backbones) to minimise downtime. 1% Downtime means that your website is unavailable for 8 hours in a month. Often you can't use your email either during this time. The webhosters mentioned below all have an uptime of 99,9% or higher (measured by independent websites).Multi domain hosting: If you have more then one domain name and want multiple websites with their own domain, multi domain hosting is the cheapest choice since you have to purchase only one hosting package. The cheapest webhosters (like dot5hosting) might not offer seperate email accounts for the additional domains. |
|
Recommended reliable
budget hosting (cheap webhosters offering hosting plans
for 10 US Dollar or less per month): |
| STEP 3: CREATE A WEBSITE | ||
|---|---|---|
|
On the Internet there are plenty recources available on how to create a website. Image galleries: If you only want to publish your pictures, there are many programs available that do most of the work for you. Myself I use a program called Arles Website Creator . It workt quite simular to Windows Explorer. You can add text to your pictures and change the layout of pages (font color, font size, background color, thumbnail and picture size). The program creates the website for you: index pages with thumbnails and pages for each individual picture. There are many programs like it. You can try some at http://www.tucows.com. Other kind of webpages: If you want to make more custom image pages or other normal web page, you need some kind of html editor.
|
| STEP 4: UPLOAD YOUR WEBSITE |
|---|
|
In order to get your website published,
you need to upload your files to the webserver of your webhoster. This is
commonly done by means of a FTP-program (FTP = file transfer protocol).
After singing up, your webhost sends you instructions on how to configure
your FTP-program to upload your files to them. Your startpage should always have a filename called index.htm or index html. |
| STEP 5: PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE |
|---|
|
Just having a website, does not mean
that people surfing the internet can find it. The most common way to be
found is to be listed insearch engines like Google. You don't get listed
automatically, so you have to submit your site to the search engines. For
most search engines submission of your URL is free. Mostly it takes at least
weeks before you listed. Be aware that there is no garantee that you get
listed at all. Other way to be found is to get listed in a directoryor via
a link on other (popular) websites.
To be indexed in a search engine is
one thing, but to get a high ranking (higher up in the list of search results)
is even more important. There some things you can do to increase your changes
for a higher ranking. |