How to design a website and host it: Simple stepwise guide for a layman

Website design is a truly open ended concept. One the one end you can put up a simple blog on blogger and have a pretty nice looking site. On the other end you can get deeply into database & CSS driven sites that have a number of associated perl and/or php scripts driving various aspects of the site. HubPages for example.

To give any solid design advice I'd have to know exactly what you want in a site. Do you want to run a store? Or just have a place to park articles similar to what you'd put on HubPages?

Here's my bias - I'm not a profesional designer, but I've put up a number of sites, blogs, Hub and Squid pages, and used several site editors. I've also hosted my sites with a number of different companies.

So since you want to design a website and host it I'll make four suggestions, all detailed below. All will require some effort and practice.

1. Set up a wordpress blog on your own host. This is by far the easiest way to get a hot looking site. Search engines love blogs and people love to comment, depending on the topic, so you can have a very active site very easily.

2. Get a program like XsitePro. You don't have to know code and it's trivial to make a nice looking site. It comes with a very easy to follow tutorial.

3. Get an Online Program like Site Rubix. The builder may be even easier than XsitePro, it's online, comes with hosting, and comes with an active community which will be a huge help inmaking money with youir site.
4. Build it from scratch. Buy a copy of Dreamweaver, or a related program, learn HTML and CSS (non trivial,) pick up a good book on website design (there's a Dummy's book that covers it) and you'll eventually be able to build a killer site.

I'm lazy and I find the first three to be much easier.

I'm putting together a series on articles on one of my websites that covers this subject in more detail. How to Build a Website, Step by Step.

Hosting is essentially very simple. You're renting space on some company's computer and they take care of all the web connections and computer maintenance for you. You put your files on their system, send them some monthly money, and you're good to go.

To start with you don't need an expensive host. A few dollars a month is a good place to start. Sites like HubPages are hosted on expensive dedicated servers, that run hundreds per month (at least) or even server farms. Your site doesn't need that. Yet. Get traffic like the Hub dudes and you will.

I host with Kiosk.ws after firing my last host. Those guys shut down two of my sites for getting too much traffic. I suggest going with Kiosk's lowest price package to start, but there are a zillion web hosts and another one might fit your needs better. Keep in mind that the cheapest isn't necessarily the way to go, though it might be great for a starter site.

Which package do you need? That depends. What kind of site do you want to put up? 300 megs of space will last you a long time. You'll need one MySQL database for a blog and you might want more later on for other scripts.

Bandwidth is a biggie. it's a measure of how much data your site is sending out. Sites with a lot of fancy graphics will need more bandwidth than sites without. Get the most you can afford. You won't use it now, but you might need it later. My boy's World of Warcraft site uses over 45 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. My Health site uses 10 gigs.

I recommend getting a host with cpanel and Fantastico and its nice if they have real customer service. Kiosk has been good to me, the last host's service disappeared when they shut down my sites.

Check to see if the host has a live chat. If so ask any questions you might have before you buy.

Having several email accounts is nice. The rest of the features will depend on what you want to do.

Buying the hosting is easy, at Kiosk or anywhere. You buy it like anything else. Pick the package you want, hit the order button, make your payment. Within a short time they'll have your account set up and send you an email with all the details.

As far as domain names go, you can either buy one when you buy your hosting, or get it from a 3rd party. See the next section for more details.

Domain names

You'll need a domain name for your new site. First, brainstorm 10 names and jot them down. Try to have a name that matches the topic your site will be about and try to have them end in .com, though that isn't essential.

When you buy your hosting you have to option of buying your domain name at the same time. I always go with a 3rd party host, because it gives me a lot more control when I need to switch hosts. It does add one more step, though: You'll need to set your nameservers.

When buying your domain from your host, or your 3rd party registrar, you'll see a field where you can enter your domain name to see if it's available. Go down the list you made and check each name for availability. Some registrars will even make suggestions if a name isn't available. Use those if they look good and your other choices aren't going to happen. Some hosting services will give you the domain free when you buy hosting.

If you go to a 3rd party registrar: Get your browser to a rregistrar such as GoDaddy.com, Register.com, DomainOrb.com, or any of many others, and then do the same as the above.

If you do the 3rd party route your next step is to point the domain name to your new site. To do this you get the nameservers from your new host. They'll look something like: NS1.NewDomainHost.com and NS2.NewDomainHost.com.

Go to your registrar, find the area/section/link that says something like "change nameservers." You'll then enter your nameserver info into the fields, hit 'submit' and you're done. The form may also ask for an IP address, but yoiu can usually skip that.

Either way, 3rd party or host, it will take up to two days for your new domain to actually work. so if you buy it and then then type it in don't worry if you get a funny looking page. It'll take care of itself presently.

So now you have your host and your domain name. What's next?

Wordpress is blogging software that you install on your server. It's awesome in that once you get it set up you'll have a hot looking site, that's highly customizable, and all you have to do is write your content.

Everything else is handled by the system. The Design is handled by themes and there are hundreds of easily available themes to pick from. Plus, installation is nearly trivial. (As you probably already know blogs can be anything from diaries to very professional sites. )

Wordpress is also free. But first...

To FTP or Not to FTP... Two ways to go, to install a Wordpress Blog.

1. Use FTP
2. Don't use FTP

Huh? FTP is a means of transfering files from your computer to the server that you're using to host your site. It's not hard, but it's an extra step. I'll discuss #2 first.

You'll need to have bought your hosting, though you won't need to have hooked up your domain name yet.

For #2 - You'll want to get a host that uses something called cpanel. This is the control panel that lets you acess all the bits and pieces of your host, such as email accounts, statisitcs, and a wonderful little widget called Fantastico. I recommend Kiosk.ws, but there are lots of cpanel hosts.

Quick note: if you get to the point where you're getting a lot of traffic some hosts will shut you down (been there, had it happen, no thanks) for using "too many resources." Some of the "A List' pro-bloggers, and HubPages type sites, use dedicated servers that run hundreds of dollars a month. You don't need to start there! A few bucks a month is a good place to start.,

Ok, back to Fantastico. You'll find this on your cpanel,it looks like a happy face button. It lets you install Wordpress, and a lot of other scripts, by clicking a couple of buttons and filling in some blanks. You get to skip the entire FTP download/upload process.

Once you've used Fantastico to set things up you'll get an email with your password and user name and access links.

Ok, back to step #1, FTPing your data.

Go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version of WP to your computer. When you unzip the file you'll have a folder simply named wordpress. Open up that folder and open up the readme file.

Go to your cpanel, make a new MySQL database (google it if you need the how to details) and make note of the database name, username, password, and host (usually localhost on cpanel sites.)

Edit your wp-config file as per the instructions in the readme file.

Grab your ftp program (go here to get one, free) and upload everything in the wordpress folder into the public_html folder of your webhost. The readme file has the rest of the install instructions. Don't worry, it's pretty easy.

Now you should have a working wordpress install. Log in and explore. There's a lot there. To learn more about WP you can google wordpress tutorial or you can check out Sherman's stuff.

Just because you didn't ask I'll put down some design thoughts of mine, in no particular order. These are my thoughts and plenty of people will have very different ideas.

• Nav bars: Generally, I like them on the right side of the page. Why? Most readers, western ones anyway, read left to right. So when someone hits my page they'll see the top left part first. I assume they're most interested in seeing the content of the page, not my nav bar, so the nav goes on the right. Usually.

• I like lots of white space. This is the space inbetween the text bits. Great walls of text are harder to read. Emulating a newspaper or magazine layout isn't a bad way to go.

• I hate pages which have text that goes all the way across the screen. I have a 21" monitor. 20 inch lines of text are annoying. Again, think newspaper columns.
• Links that go off site should open a new window.

• Links should be obviously links. Some people like to make links with colors that are the same, or only slightly different than that of the main text. I like my links to be links. Blue and underlined works for me.

• High contrast text. Black text on white background. Everything else is harder to read, though other colors may look cooler.

• Fonts. Don't mix them up. Keep to the standard fonts and keep a consistent font on the page (like those newspapers, again.) If you use a fancy font keep in mind that the person reading your page might not have that font on their system, so they won't see it the way you want it. Make and use a graphic if you want the fancy fonts.

• At the very least look at your site in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. You may see some surprising differences. Even if you hate IE you have to keep in mind that more people use it than any other browser (lots more, according to my web stats.) Actually, if there's some issue it's likely to look better in IE than Firefox. (I use FF, by the way.)
• If you can you should look at your site with several other browsers, in addition to IE and FF. You might find some interesting differences in how each browser displays your site.

Website design is somethng that can be argued about forever. It's like ecomomics: ask ten people and you'll get 11 opinions. Which web site builder you choose will dictate certain design limitations.

I recommend XsitePro (XSP) because I use it. Alot. There are other site building programs out there, but this is the one I use, and I haven't used the others, so it's the one I'll yak about, ok? ;)

I learned to do websites by entering the raw HTML code by hand. I used a nice HTML editor for years before moving to Dreamweaver. I'm not a designer, the sites I put up are for my own use, and I like to keep things simple. A professional designeror CSS pro will have a very different idea of things than I do.

XSP is a website builder. This means that you fill in a few blanks, pick a template (you can add more or make your own,) and start writing. Adding pages is easy, and all the other essential page building stuff is there. Upload and you have a complete site, ready to go. The design of the site allows clean and easy navigation and a clean layout. It may not be hot, unless you have some really good design skills, but it will look good.

You'll be able to quickly buiuld a site with consistend headers, footers, nav bars, etc. You'll also be able to place your graphics and ads and generally be able to plug in a variety of scripts, including Google's Adsense.

XsitePro takes the coding out of the site design business. The program is designed to allow you to quickly and easily put up good looking sites in a minimum of time, without mucking about with the HTML or CSS code. Dreamweaver is far more powerful, but you'll get a good site up with XSP in a lot less time.

You'll need to grab your hosting and domain name exactly the way you would with a blog (see above.) As far as FTP goes, XSP is it's own FTP program (as is dreamweaver) so you can enter your ftp details into the program and upload your sites and changes without using another program. In fact, XSP pretty much insists that you do it that way.

You get it set up buying buying your copy here, download, install, and you're good to go. Don't forget to read the tutorial. I can pretty much guarantee that your first site will look good and your next sites will be even better. It won't look like the World of Warcraft site, but it will be clean and efficient.

XSP also makes it easy to edit your sites. Anytime you need to make any change just do it and upload.

What? You think you may want to actually edit the raw HTML/CSS code? Then look to Dreamweaver or one of the other site building platforms. While XSP will let you edit the HTML content of each page you can't edit the template code at all. Actually, whicle XSP will let you access.that code it's a pretty sorry code editor. Notepad (or the Mac or Linux version of notepad) is better. But then, it wasn't intended to be a code editor.

if you don't want to fuss with the code then XSP is hard to beat. For example XSP sites you can take a look at my alternative health site or my unix tools site or even the XsitePro hompage.

Site Rubix, the Drag and Drop Designer.

What on Earth is a Site Rubix??? It's a very cool online site builder. You don't have to download anything to your computer. You log into a drag and drop interface which will allow you to rapidly build your site. Like XSP it's intended for the person who wants to make some money with her site.

No HTML/CSS is coding knowledge is required. None, zip, nada. Once you get the system down, you should be able to create a 10 page site in 5 minutes, assuming you already have content written.

Now, Site Rubix is designed and intended for the person who wants to make some money with their websites. It comes with free hosting and a whole set of tools which will make it easy to quickly build good looking sites.

It also comes with the Wealthy Affiliate system which will show you how to make money with your sites. Check out the video on the home page and see what Site Rubox and Wealthy Affiliate can do for you.