Learn How to Make a Website for Your Business or Personal Use

By Emily Curio

There are many reasons you might want a website, whether it is for your business or personal use. Whatever your purpose, unless you plan to have someone else do the work for you, the first thing you'll need to learn is how to make a website.

Before you decide how you will go about building your website, you should look at the various options available. If you want to go the easy route, try starting a blog. That's a special type of website that is usually used by people who want to post information frequently, but that doesn't mean you have to. You can set up a blog to work like a regular website pretty easily.

When you set up a blog, you are using a platform that has been designed especially for that purpose. The software does most of the work so you don't have to. There is no coding required and you can easily change the look of the entire blog just by changing the theme. There are free services online such as Blogger and Wordpress that will host your blog for you. You can also purchase a domain name and hosting package and set up Wordpress on your own domain if you prefer.

If you want a regular HTML site, you can design it using a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for 'what you see is what you get.' It's called that because when you design something on the screen of a WYSIWYG editor, it looks just like it will look on the webpage when you upload it to your hosting. When choosing an HTML editor, try to find one that is easy to use and allows you to move things around easily.

If you want to do it the geeky way, you can always write the code from scratch. This is obviously the hardest method because you actually have to learn the code. Not that HTML is hard; it just takes some time to learn it and get good at making websites by writing code. You can use the same WYSIWYG editor to write code. You just start in the code window and switch to preview mode to see what your webpage looks like.

There are many WYSIWYG editors that you can download online. Some of them are quite easy to use and others are cumbersome. The only way to know which one you like is to play around with them. Some of them save files in a special format that can only be read by the editor, so don't start your actual website until you are comfortable with the editing program and are sure that it is the one you want to use to build your website.

If you're new to designing websites, I really recommend that you start out by setting up a blog. That is by far the easiest way to go. Your second choice should be using a good WYSIWYG editor to design an HTML site using templates from your web host. Better yet, unless you want to seriously pursue website design or blogging as a hobby, you'll probably get the best possible results by hiring a professional web designer. Many of them are quite affordable, and you'll save yourself a lot of headaches. - 33376

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