How to set up a website

Last updated: September 22, 2008.

The famous American inventor and publisher Benjamin Franklin once said that two things in life are certain: death and taxes. These days, he might add something else to that list: websites—because just about everybody seems to have one! Businesses promote themselves with websites, television soaps have spinoff sites devoted to their characters, newlyweds set up sites for their wedding photographs, and most kids have profiles (statements about themselves and what they like) on "social-networking sites" such as MySpace and Facebook. If you feel like you're getting left behind, maybe it's time to set up a site yourself? How do you go about it? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: Our gateway to the world: the World Wide Web (WWW). You can set up your own website in a matter of minutes!

What is a website?

The first thing you need to be clear about is the difference between the Internet and the Web. The Internet is the name we give to the global network of connections between virtually every computer on the planet that allows them to exchange information. The Web is one of many things that uses the Internet: the basic idea of the Web is that you can read information that anyone else has stored on a publicly accessible space called their website.

If you're familiar with using computers for wordprocessing, you'll know that when you create a document (such as a letter or a CV/resumé), it exists on your computer as a file, which you store in a place called a folder (or you might call it a directory if you're a bit old-fashioned). A website is simply a collection of interlinked documents, generally all stored in the same directory on a publicly accessible computer known as a server. Apart from the main documents (text pages), a website generally also contains images or graphic files (photographs, typically stored as JPG files, and artworks, usually stored as GIF or PNG files). So the basic idea of creating a website involves writing all these text pages and assembling the various graphic files you need, then putting them all together in a folder where other people can access them.

What do you need to host a website?

Theoretically, you could turn your own computer into a server and allow anyone else on the planet to access it to browse your website. All you have to do is configure your computer in a certain way so that it accepts incoming traffic from the Internet and also register your computer with all the other servers on the Internet so they know where to find it. There are three main reasons why this is not generally a good idea. First, you won't be able to use your computer for anything else because it will be spending all its time serving requests for information from other people. (But if you have more than one computer, that's not such a problem.) Second, you'd have to make sure that your computer was switched on and available 24 hours a day—and you might not want to do that. Third, making your computer available to the Internet in this way is something of a security risk. A determined hacker might be able to access all the other folders on your machine and either steal your information or do other kinds of malicious damage.

So, in practice, people rent web space on a large computer operated by an Internet service provider (ISP). This is known as getting someone to host your website for you. Generally, if you want to set up a website, you will need a hosting package (a basic contract with an ISP to give you so much disk space and bandwidth (the maximum amount of information that your website can transfer out to other people each month). The web space you get is simply a folder (directory) on the ISPs server and it will have a fairly obscure and unmemorable name such as: www.myownpersonalISP.com/ABC54321/   That's not exactly the sort of thing you want to paint on the side of your truck, if you're in business. So you'll need a more memorable name for your website—also called a domain name. The domain name is simply a friendly address that you give to your website so that other people can find it more easily. The domain address is set up to point to the real address of your site at your ISPs server
(www.myownpersonalISP.com/ABC54321/ ), so when people type your domain name into their Web browser, they are automatically redirected to the correct address without actually having to worry about what it is.

Some ISPs offer a user-friendly system where you simply purchase a domain name and hosting package for a single annual payment (generally, it will be less than about $60 or £30 per annum). With other ISPs, you have to buy the domain name and the hosting package separately and that works out better if you are hosting several different domains with the same ISP. Buying a domain name makes you its legal owner and you'll find that you are immediately registered on a central database known as WHOIS, so that other people can't use the same name as well.

Read more in our web hosting buyer's guide.

How do you create web pages?

Setting up a domain name and Web hosting package takes all of five minutes; creating a website can take an awful lot longer because it means writing all the information you need, coming up with a nice page layout, finding your photographs, and all the rest of it. Generally, there are three ways to create web pages.

The first is to use an editing program that does all the hidden Web-page coding (known as HTML) for you. This is called a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor because you lay out your pages on the screen broadly as you want them to appear to everyone who browses your site. Editors such as Microsoft's Front Page (now built into Microsoft Office) and Mozilla Sea Monkeywork in this way. Most word processors, including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, let you convert existing documents into web pages ("export HTML files") with a couple of mouse clicks.

Another way to create web pages is to use a very simple text editor such as notepad or WordPad on Windows and build up your pages from raw HTML web page coding as you go. Generally, this gives you a much better understanding of how web pages work, but it's a bit harder for novices to get the hang of it—and unless you're a geek you may not want to bother.

A third way of making a website it is to use ready-made pages called templates. They're bare-bones, pre-designed HTML files into which you simply insert your own content. Just change the bits you need and you have an instant website! The main drawback of templates is that you can end up with a me-too site that looks the same as everyone else's. Most blogs are built from templates—and that's why blogs often tend to look quite similar.

Photo: This is what this Web page looks like "behind the scenes". The little codes you can see inserted are bits of HTML, which identify parts of the text as headings, paragraphs, graphics and so on. For example, new paragraphs are marked out with <p>.

How do you upload web pages?

Once you've created your web pages and you have your domain name and web space, you simply need to upload the pages onto your web space using a method called FTP (file transfer protocol). It's very easy: just like copying files from one folder of your computer to another. When you've uploaded your files, your website should be publicly accessible within seconds (assuming that your domain name has already been registered for a few days first). Updating your web pages is then simply a matter of updating them on your local computer, as often as you wish, and copying the changes onto your web space as necessary. Generally it's best to do all your updating on copies of your pages on your own computer rather than editing live pages on the server itself. You avoid embarrassing mistakes that way, but you also have a useful backup copy of the entire site on your computer in case the server crashes and loses all your files.

How can you promote a website?

You want lots of other people to find your website, so you'll need to encourage other websites to make links to yours. You'll also need to register your site with search engines such as Google, MSN Live Search, and all the dozens of others. Sooner or later, search engines like Google will pick up your site if it's linked by other sites that they're already indexing, because they're constantly "crawling" the web looking for new content.

And that's pretty much all there is to it. The best way to learn about websites is to build one for yourself. So, off you go and do it! You can learn all about building basic web pages by playing with HTML files on your computer. Once you're confident about what you're doing, it's easy to take the next step and make a world-wide website for the whole wide world!