How to Design a Website in 5 Easy Steps: Learn How to Build A Website in One Weekend or Less!

Building a website these days has become really easy. With the tools and software available - often for free - anybody can build a website in just a few hours, without any special knowledge of design or programming. Obviously, I'm talking about simple personal sites, niche money making sites, or company sites, not enterprise web applications with sophisticated features and designs.

Most people who can use a text editor and know how to send an email posses enough skills to build their own website from scratch in a matter of hours, or in one weekend. The hardest part is actually knowing what to do; then doing it is easy. That's why I wrote this web design web course - if you follow these five steps outlined below, in just a few hours - or days, depending on your schedule - you will have your first website with your own domain name, on your own hosting account.

5 Steps to Building Your Own Profitable Website

So here are the steps required to build a website. I'm assuming that you are building a website for your business, so you already know your niche.

Step 1. Register a domain name. Go to godaddy.com or other domain registrar's website and search for available domains. Choose a .com domain with keywords that best describe your business and site's content, while providing the most profit potential. Domain registration costs about $10 per year.

Step 2. Set up a hosting account. Select a reliable hosting company with phone and online support, such as Bluehost or Hostgator. I advise you to select a plan that allows to set up unlimited number of domains on your hosting - such plans usually cost about $7 per month, so the expense is not high, and you'll be able to set up more website on the same hosting space.

Step 3. Install WordPress with a one click installation. I recommend Bluehost or Hostgator because they both provide easy WordPress installation. You may be wondering just what is WordPress and why should you be using it? WordPress is a very easy-to-use content management system (CMS) that allows you to build and expand your website without the need of any special tools or knowledge of programming. You can access your administrator's panel from any web browser, and to add a new page you'll be using an editor that looks a lot like your internet email interface. You can just type your text there, add a title, click publish, and voila - you'll have a brand new page added to your website. Cost: Free.

WordPress is an open-source platform that is available free of cost - for more information go to WordPress.org (don't confuse it with Wordpress.com, which is a paid hosting platform for WordPress.)

Step 4. Select and purchase a beautiful, professionally designed template. If you want a look is professional and sophisticated, without the high cost of hiring a web designer, then you can purchase a professionally designed theme at one of the following websites: Studio Press, Elegant Themes, or Themeforest. Choose the design that you like and purchase the theme. Read the instructions on how to install it, activate it and set it up. You will need ftp software to upload the theme to your website. I recommend FileZilla software, which is free and easy to use. Cost: depending on the template ranges from about $30 to $100.

Step 5. Optimize your pages for the search engines. There are many methods that you can use to promote your website - pay per click, social media, article marketing, video marketing - and each of these methods can be highly effective if used properly and consistently. However - I advise you start with learning how search engines work and how to attract maximum traffic coming from the search engines to your pages. Whether you are trying to sell something, or just want to spread a word about your business, every web page needs traffic, and the search engine traffic that is targeted to what you have to offer is the best traffic that you can attract.

Obviously, learning search engine optimization is a complicated subject - too big for this hub, so I recommend you visit the Keyword Academy website at thekeywordacademy.com to learn how to build websites that make money. Download and watch their videos. Cost: $1 for the first month, then 30 dollars per month. You will also learn how to earn money online with these sites.