Easy,fast,economical way to create a website

Its amazing how easy it is these days to put up a new website and it can come quite cheap also.

We all know that you can even put up your own blog or a website for free on many shared websites like geocities.com, blogger.com (from Google) etc. But this post specifically focuses on what it takes to have a dedicated website with a name and suffix (For e.g .com, .in, .org) of your choice, which is of course not possible with shared sites.

Lets look at step-by-step procedure for creating your own website-

• Get a domain name for yourself

This refers to the name of the website, called as “domain” from a technical perspective. For e.g. the domain for this website is golumolu.in. There are thousands of vendors who can have the domain registered for you. Cost starts from as low as Rs. 200/- (~ USD 5) to Rs. 800/- (~ USD 20) or more charged as a yearly subscription. The .com, .org domains are cheaper as compared to the .in domain and so on.

• Get a web hosting account

We have the domain name registered from the above step. We now need to sign up with a web hosting vendor who will provide space on a webserver to host website content and a few tools. If you are a newbie, get started with a 20Mb package and upgrade as necessary. Vendors even offer a 20Mb starter package for a nominal amount of Rs. 100/- (USD 2.5). Upgrades are available to 100Mb, 500Mb and so on. A simple website can be run with 100Mb space, unless you are hosting videos or music for download.

• Start building your website

With the above two steps done, we now have a domain name as well as space to host website content. You may now start making the website content and host it at the address provided by the web hosting vendor. The total cost involved so far (at the lower end) is about Rs. 600/- (about 15$). Well, that’s quite economical for having your website and even more justified if it is promote your business or if you plan to monetize your website by contextual advertising with Google AdSense etc.

We are now done with the cost part of creating the website. Lets talk about the ease of putting together the content.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Everyone who wants to create a website would like it to look good like one of the professional ones. But, for that is it necessary for one to be an expert at HTML?  Wouldn’t it take a lot of time to put up well designed content? Making a website interactive with polls, comments, blogs seems even more out of reach.

Well, not really. This is where a good content management system comes into the picture. This software helps to put up content real quick and with all the advanced features that you see on the website these days at the click of a few buttons. Imagine it like using Microsoft Word or Excel. It could be that simple.

There are several popular Content Management Systems. Talking of the free and open source CMS’s, one of the very popular ones is Joomla. If you plan to put up only Blogs, then your clear choice is WordPress. This is one of the best free tools for creating Blogs. This blog that you are reading is created with WordPress.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. Tools such as Joomla provide Microsoft word like interface for end users to quickly build web content instead of dealing with raw HTML.

More content on this topic will follow soon. Meanwhile, do take a minute rate this article and/or provide email feedback by clicking on the envelope icon displayed in the banner on top of this page.

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