How Can I Create a Quick and Easy Website?

These days, to have a website is almost an essential part of any business, small or large. Even if the website is just one page that says how to get hold of you then that can help increase your profile and possibly your sales.

However, if you have no idea on how to go about creating a quick and easy website then it can be quite a daunting task to think about doing this for yourself. Perhaps you have a small business or even a hobby that you need a website for but you don't know where to start. I will set out here in basic terms what you need to do to create a small and simple website for yourself and how you can do this with only a small amount of money and no knowledge of any web based languages like HTML (the computer language that web pages are written in).

There are two main parts of a website that you need to think about:

1. The Domain Name (the name you type in to find your web page)
2. The Hosting of the website itself (the pages)

So taking the domain name first, you will need to choose a name for your website. Choose a name that is highly relevant to your business and one that you will not (hopefully) need to change at a later date. The name can also be useful when people are searching for you and/or just a product like yours, for example, if you are a plumber you might want to choose something like home-plumbing-services.com rather than maybe your name which might be frank-white.com (from the domain name no-one would know that Frank White is a plumber). Also, if you subsequently wanted to sell your company, a more descriptive name for your company or website would be better than if someone else took over frank-white.com.

So, you can search for available domain names through any hosting provider. Prices do vary but I have found that GoDaddy offer very competitive prices on their domain purchases. Just type in the name you are looking for and it will tell you if it is available. You will also need to pick the extension (whether you want .com, .co.uk or anything else). This may depend on availability if you want a particular domain, or you may want to show that you are a local company (.us or .co.uk for example) or if you are providing information (.info) etc. Prices vary depending on the extension.

So, once you have chosen and purchased your domain name, you then need to find somewhere to create your website and host your website pages. This can be the same provider from whom you bought your domain name or a different provider. It may be simpler to use the same company but you can look around for different deals and they will show you how to link up the two things. It is also possible to get a free website with the provider who you bought the domain name from.

There are a number of ways to build a website but for this article I am going to look at the most simple for people who don't know how to build their own pages. You can build a page from scratch but when you are a beginner in website building this is probably not something you want to consider. So, to make things easy for you, a lot of web hosting providers (including GoDaddy above) provide an easy way to build a site with ready made web builder templates. These include lots of images and website templates that you can choose from so you don't have to find them yourself. Often all you need to do is to fill in some pre-designed details like your contact information and this is automatically put into your chosen website template.

It really is simple to use these web builder templates so don't be afraid of trying it and there are often online chats with their customer service agents to help you out if you get stuck. Sometimes these websites are free and sometimes there is a small charge but they are generally not expensive.

Make sure that you have some of your own images that you can use when building a website to make the site more personal to your business. You can upload images easily through the web builder interface and although the custom web templates have great images you will probably want a website that is unique to you.