What is it – a website?
According to the Wikipedia a website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Sounds complicated? I agree. Simply saying, a website is some text located on the internet (worldwide network of computers). Sounds easier?
Ready to build your own website?
So if the internet is just a text you might have a bunch of fair questions – how to write this text, how to put it on the internet, how to make links, etc. The answer is – HTML5. This is not a spell. But a name for a special language – Hypertext Markup Language. It is not as hard as it sounds. You just need to learn some special rules to make special sentences. This is for the computer to understand what you are trying to say or display. HTML5 will help you to put content on your website – like text, links, images, videos, etc. If you want your content to be arranged in a special order and look pretty you will need to learn another special language – CSS. Cascading Style Sheets that what CSS stands for. So this language is in charge of the styles of your HTML content – it means that CSS makes all the decorations. Equally-important above languages always go together and create cool website like one you are on now or for example this one.
Here we go!
To answer the question “where to write it” I would surprise you – in the notepad (yes simple notepad app on your computer). If you want to make an experiment – just open a Notepad and write “Hello world!”, than click Save As and type index.html to create your first website. Now you can right-click on your text file and open it with the browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc). Then congratulate yourself with making your own first website. But you might fairly ask how other people can access it? Right, you need a host server – a computer connected to the internet which will store your website and a domain name – the address which will tell where your file is located. You can use Google to find where to buy a domain name and hosting for your website – it is really easy nowadays and can be done in a few steps at a low cost.
Looking for an easier way of building websites?
Fair enough! Nowadays it is really easy to build the website with CMS – content management systems. There are plenty of them on the internet – free and not free, flexible and not. The most popular is WordPress – it is open-source, very flexible, easy to use drag and drop platform. All the necessary tutorials you can find in the web, they are absolutely free. So if you are looking at building your own website, just go to WordPress website and you will find all the necessary information. But to be honest it does take time and patience to learn how to build high quality websites. It is not only about the design, but also the background work – the security, search engine optimisation, back-ups and so on. It means if you don`t have time for it – go to the professionals such as Weblizard. Those guys are knowlegeable, flexible, easy to deal with and do the job at a very reasonable price. Subscribe to my blog and you will recieve a special discount for their services!