Choosing the Right Kind of Website for You

How to make your own website, one would think, in these modern times should be a relativley simple task. However this area of interest has, like many before it, descended into a morass of overwhelming information online, all seemingly correct! The difficulty is how to select out the important from the unimportant (or just plain wrong) information and not get totally overwhelmed in the process!

Like any area where there is a sea of information to sift through, making or creating your own website usually comes down to some simple points that, if adhered to, should lead you to having the website you wanted.

The key question at the beginning of this process to ask yourself is, "WHY do I want a website?" A website must have a purpose, a reason for existing and at the end of the day it must serve somebody. Even if it it only to serve yourself, somebody must benefit from its existence.

Any website that has no purpose or reason for being there either languishes in some internet backwater and dies of neglect or become a source of constant frustration because it doesn't do what it is supposed to do.

So to keep it simple the "why" question answers can be broken down into two main categories of website. BUSINESS and PERSONAL.

Personal Websites:

This category further breaks down into sub-categories and the one you belong in depends again on the "why" of the website. At this point you probably want to go with free services as they are a great way to get on to the learning curve and carry no financial penalty for failure!

"I feel I have something important, interesting, amusing, opinionated (choose one or all!) to say and I want people to know about it."

If this is you then a conventional website is not for you. You would be best served by a blog. With a blog you can happily and frequently broadcast you inner thoughts and opinions to the world and have others comment and interact with you.

From the outset and until you are familiar with the process, the easiest and cheapest way to go here is by using one of the many free blog services available. Blogger.com and blog.com are a couple of the more traditional free blog sites but you may also want to take a look at squidoo.com and even freewebs.com for interesting alternatives that allow the functionality of a blog as well as a website "feel" to them.

"Mom, all the kids at school have a website. Why don't I have a website?"

Freewebs.com and freehostia.com offer free hosting and simple to use design software that is very suitable for building a website for or with kids. In addition to that they are also a good place to start if you want to have a site for the family or a small social group. In the case of family or social site if you are likely to be using a lot of photos then there is also flikr.com and ifunpix.com which allow online sharing of your photos.

"I want to stay home and meet people."

The social networking sites are exactly what you are looking for. The kings of this area are facebook.com and myspace.com and both are a great, free, places to begin your whirlwind of virtual social engagements!

Bear in mind your first choice from these suggestions may very well be wrong. The beauty of these services is that they are free, so there are no costly mistakes and more importantly they will introduce you to what you can and can't do with that service. Armed with that information you can then progress to the exact service and website format you need with confidence.

Business Websites:

This category really only has two sub-caregories. First, you have an existing business that you want to take online and second, you want to start an online business.

"Bob. I was talking to my son last night and he looked at me with...well...pity in his eyes when I mentioned we don't have a website for the business."

First and foremost it is not necessarily true that every business on the planet needs to have a presence on the internet. However it is true that many businesses that should have a presences don't. One of the main reasons for this is that they either don't know why they should or don't know how to go about it properly.

There are also many businesses that have or have had an internet presence and that website has done absolutely nothing for either the business or its customers. Again we come back to the original idea that a website must serve or benefit somebody.

From a "do it yourself" perspective only, there are a few points to consider here in how to go about making your own website.

Hosting:

Hosting is simply a service that provides a place for your site on the internet so that others can find it. For business a free hosting service is unsuitable for a number of reasons.

A free hosting service will, most likely be running ads on your site to offset the cost of running the service. Very often these will be Google Adsense ads and without going into the technicalities suffice to say you will probably be running ads for your competitors!

A free hosting service may not allow you to have full control over the domain name of your site. Again, without going into the technicalities, if you sell "greeblies" then you want a domain name like "greeblies.com." This way search engines and people will begin to find your site more quickly. With a free service your domain name will most likely be something like "freehostingforwebsites.com/user/12345/greeblies.com." Trust me, the search engines nor anyone else will NEVER find your site!

Finally the point of reliability. You want the site to be up and running 24/7 and whilst the free services may say they have great uptime statistics in this world "ya gets what ya pays for."

Design:

Again from a "do it yourself" perspective there are many, many website hosting services that offer the use of a sitebuilder as part of their hosting package. There are a few good points and bad points to this in relation to the sitebuilding software itself and how it is integrated into the hosting packge as well.

First the software. Web hosting companies offer two types of software for you to design your own site and all offer a wide range of templates that you can use to design the site. It is a competitive market and because of that, you benefit.

From the outset you most likely don't want to buy your own web design software and then go through the learning curve of becoming a web master so the "drag and drop" style of sitebuilder offered by these companies is perfect. However all sitebuilders were not created equal.

One type of sitebuilder is housed on the servers of the hosting company. You go to their website, log in to your account and then open the sitebuilder. From there you can "point and click" and "drag and drop" to create your masterpiece website. All the companies offer a wide range of design tips, tricks and techniques for how to do it so that is not a problem at all. It is very simple.

The downside to this type of sitebuilder is that because it is housed on the hosting company's servers you must be connnected to the internet to use it and if that connection gets slow or broken then you are in trouble. Also because it is remote these types of sitebuilder tend to be slightly limited in the amount of control you have over what you put on the site, how you put it there and how you want parts of the site to behave.

The other type of sitebuilder is downloadable and installs on to your computer. These types of sitebuilder tend to have a wider range of features and offer greater persoanal control over the site you design. They have the same simple interface as their online counterparts but because they are located on your computer are generally far more advanced.

The downside is that the hosting company offering the software is just not going to give that away for free! The catch is that these sitebuilders will be locked into a hosting deal with the hosting company and will create the site in a format that is only recognised by that company and that software. Whilst this may seem to be a problem really it is not. Once you build the site and load it on to your hosting space it MUST be converted to the same standard file types as all sites on the internet. From there it is a simple matter if using any one of hundreds of free software that will download your entire site to your computer as a backup.

With a little looking around on the internet you can easily find a hosting deal that is cheap, fits your needs and offers a sitebulider that you feel comfortable with. Try a few out before you commit and avoid any that don't allow a free trial of the software.

Cheap Hosting:

If you take a look around the internet you will notice there are two price ranges for hosting in general at the bottom end of the market where you are. The first will be the US$4.00 to $8.00 market and the next is the $15.00 to $20.00 market.

The cheaper deals are based on the concept of shared hosting. That means that your site is sharing the space with many other sites. For the beginning website the cheaper is fine. If you start to get lots and lots of traffic you can always upgrade because, theoretically, you would be realizing greater income from the site. As a general rule of thumb you should be looking for these features: unlimited pages for your site, about 1000gig of bandwidth (that you will never use), about 100gig of space for the site or sites you have, at least one free domain name if you sign up, full email capability, the ability to add more domain names on to the same account and cPanel or some similar web statistics and control panel functionality so that you can run the site and check your stats.

In closing I think the main lessons to learn in entering this field is to first and foremost try to envision why you want a website. This point alone will allow you to cut through a huge amount of unnecessary information and cut to the chase. Then, whether for fun or profit is go for a free or very cheap, but established service first. You first foray into the are may not be the thumping success you imagined but if learn as you go and get better as you go, without the financial pain, you will keep going.

Good luck!