The Non Techie is intrigued, yet bewildered by the concept of a webpage existing on the web. Many computer beginners often wonder about websites - who chooses the website address? How do they exist? Are there any costs involved? Although this is only a basic guide, it will give you the necessary instruction on how to setup a website in 5 easy steps.

Step 1 - Register a Domain
The domain is the website address such as www.whateveryouwant.com

You get to pick anything you want, so long as it is not already registered by someone else. Once registered, you essentially “own” that piece of electronic property - nobody else can use it but you! Registration is typically done in terms of fixed length, such as the popular 1 year term. It is quite cheap to register a .com domain name, usually around $10 give or take. To maintain the rights to your domain name, you must continue to re-register before the term expires. Thus, it is sometimes convenient to register for say 5 years at a time. Just like a drivers license, you have to pay the price to keep the rights!

I used a company called Sibername to register www.pcauthority.ca. You can checkout Sibername’s website at www.sibername.com.

Step 2 - Build the Website Itself
A website is merely a series of files written in a computer programming language called HTML. HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. Simply put, HTML files can be read by web browsers and the information within the file is nicely displayed on your screen. This is what happens every time you visit a website - Links to other pages are shown, coloured text is displayed in english, and bright images appear. HTML files provide the foundation for the World Wide Web in it’s entirety.

Anyways, you need to either program the website, or find somebody to do this for you. There is lots of help available if you do some searching on the web. A good introduction to HTML can be found here

Step 3 - Get an FTP Client
FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is essentially just used for transfering files between 2 computers. Using an FTP client, you can upload your newly designed website to the web host in the next step. I recommend using FileZilla at www.filezilla-project.org

Step 4 - Choose a Web Host
A web host is a company which will make your website publicly available on the web 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Essentially you pay the web host company to place your website (HTML files) on their computers. Their computers are called Servers, specially designed to “host” and “serve” your website on the web.

There are a million and one options when it comes to choosing a web hosting company. If you are just creating a basic website, the cost is very low. In most cases, it will only be a couple of dollars per month to host your website. In fact, I can recommend a company that will actually host your website for FREE. The company is called DotEasy, and you can check their website out at www.doteasy.com

Step 5 - Input DNS Settings
This last step is small, but important. DNS is an acronym for Domain Name Server. These servers allow web browsers to navigate to the correct webpage when a specific URL is typed into the address bar. Your DNS server settings are given to you by your web host of choice. These settings must then be given to your domain name registrar. Usually, this information can be entered via the domain registrar’s website. Essentially, this will point your domain name (website address) to the computers which are hosting your website. Put simply, this is very important else nothing will work.

So although this guide is not exhaustive by any means, it does provide a simple explanation on how to setup a website. I hope you learned a thing or two about how we do things on the web. If anybody has any questions about any of the steps listed, please feel free to ask me a question. I would be happy to help anybody get their website up and going!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 7:29 pm and is filed under World Wide Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.