Learning Basic Web Design
While the tech bubble has popped, online business still offer unlimited potential to earn a living and be your own boss. The home for your online business is a webpage and you will need to learn the basics before you can create your own if you want to be successful. Read on to learn about some of the jargon that confuses many about how websites work.
One of the first steps in creating your website is purchasing your domain. The domain is your site's address. It is also what visitors will type into their web browser every time they want to visit your site. Your domain is closely tied to your site so make sure that will make sense and is memorable to your visitors.
You can choose to purchase your own domain, or you can get one for free. If you want a site that is purely yours you will need to purchase one. If you are on a budget or just experimenting you can get a free domain to get started with. One of the main free domain generators is Wordpress which gives you the domain of mysitename.wordpress.com.
Free domains are a great place to get started, but you will need to purchase your own domain if you want to run a professional site. Having a free domain looks tacky when you are trying to do business, and it also makes people think that you aren't truly invested in the business. Having your own domain can be very inexpensive, as well as giving you more freedom to create what you want.
Another expense of having your own page is hosting. Hosting services store the information that makes up your website. You will need to consider many things when choosing a provider such as price, back up plans, and server up time. It is good practice to have separate companies for domain services and hosting. That will make things easier if you ever decide to work with a different hosting provider.
Now that you have purchased your domain and hosting package it is finally time to start coding your website. Your hosting service may offer pre-built themes and a graphical design interface that you can start with. In the long run, however, you will want to learn at least the basics of HTML, as this will give you complete control over your site. This is the basic language that all sites are coded in. There are ways to view the coding of any site, so check out some of your favorites to see how they created the effects you really enjoy.
Now that you have all of the ingredients it is time to start building your first site. Once you finish learning the basics there is plenty more depth you can add to your site by working with some of the more advance techniques. Fortunately, you can create a great site using only the basic tools and some fantastic content. Once you have tasted success you will be hungry to learn and create more.
