Having My Own Website: a free guide to setting up your own website

For creating a site from a package, without HTML or other coding, see Do-it-Yourself Site Types

Site Plan

First, decide how you want to organize your site. Clear and logical navigation is essential. If your visitor can't find his way easily around your site, he will leave.

If you haven't already done so, organize your material by subject, then decide how the subjects should relate to each other. It will probably help to sketch out a plan like the one at left. Keep the pages short. Search engines won't spider a page with more than 100K, but probably 25 to 50K is more readable. Provide a menu to each page on every page of your site. Provide a link back to your home page on every page, so that people can start at the beginning if they get lost.

Most site creation tools include a site planning tool.

WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Software

The most widely used tool on the market for designing web pages in a visual environment is Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox . Dreamweaver has a rich array of features. It costs $199. If you are only creating one simple site, it may not be worth the investment. You are better off with a hosting site that provides simpler, less feature-rich site creation tools. For example, Site2You.com gives you web page templates that you can then modify online.

If you want your own site creation tool, there are many free or inexpensive tools, such as Namo WebEditor. You can download a free preview of Namo WebEditor at Tucows.

If you want to have forms on your website, there are packages that will allow you to build and process them. Form Maker gives you tools to build forms and process the results for as little as $69.95.

Coding in HTML

HTML is not terribly difficult. It's about as hard to learn as a spreadsheet program. You will find numerous free tutorials and courses on the web to help you get started, such as "Build Your Own Website" at Suite101.com

You'll still find it easier to use an editor, such as CoffeeCup HTML Editor. Here's a list of free WYSIWYG HTML editors. Of course, many programs such as Microsoft Word also provide you with the ability to save a document as an HTML file. The downside of all these editors is that they add a lot of extra code to the pages, so they will be slower to load than hand written ones. That won't necessarily be a problem if you keep your pages short, which you should do for your visitors' sake anyway.

There are several pre-written scripts and graphic templates available if you want to add a little pizazz to your pages. Even if you code in HTML, you might want to use a template as a basis. They're very inexpensive (about $35 to $50) and add a professional look to your site. For a list, see More resources.

You can even incorporate some programming into your pages without knowing how to program. There are sites that provide ready-written scripts, either free, like The JavaScript Resource or Webmasters Cavern, or for a small fee, like Elegant Scripts. Elegant Script is a scripts directory with scripts in different languages. It also has tutorials, a discussion board and FAQs for beginners.

Testing

Look at all your web pages in at least two popular browsers: Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. If you're developing your pages on your local computer, you can view the pages without uploading them to your server. In your MS Explorer window, click on File > Open...> Browse... and click on the name of the HTML page. In Firefox or Netscape, click on File > Open File...

You are testing to see that the page looks good, and that all your links work.

Also,you should try the pages in different screen resolutions. To do this, on a PC, in the Start menu, click on "Control Panel", "Display" ans "Settings".

Even once you have tested it on your PC or local server, test it again once you have uploaded it to your web server. The most experienced web developers make mistakes!

When you're all finished making sure the page looks okay, you'll need to give some thought to whether it's optimized for search engines. A good, free tool for testing that, and also for learning a lot about proper page construction, is Sitening's SEO Analyzer.

Step Five: Promote the site