In the era of fast and affordable Internet, many people are thinking about creating their own website – whether it is a website for their school, department or sports section, a website for their blog or portfolio, a website for their business or just a business card site with resumes and research papers. To the question “why do I need a website” everyone answers for himself in his own way. But if the decision has already been made, let’s proceed with our instructions.
First, you have to decide what kind of site you need – a static single-page, dynamically updated blog, online store, a large information portal, and so on. If you need a store or a large website, it is unlikely that you can do it for free. So today we will focus on small personal sites, blogs and pages. Our site is an example of what we will talk about.
The first thing to do is to select the following:
- site name
- hosting
- cms
How do I choose a site name? You need to check which names are free and which are busy. There are many online services to check the availability of names – search code words “whois”, “check free site names,” etc. In such services there is a line to enter the desired name of the site and select the zone in which to check it – .ru / .com / info, etc. Usually .ru for the price of normal, but the .org can be very expensive, because they are made for business. Choosing your favorite free site name, you need to buy it. To buy the name of the site there are also many ways – the code word to search for “buy a site name”, “buy a domain name”, “buy a domain name”, “domain registration” and so on.
Next, you need to buy hosting. Hosting – a place to store your site on the Internet. There are free hosting, but they usually put their ads. It is better to buy a hosting from one of the major Internet providers. Sometimes you will be given a temporary free hosting, if you buy a website address, but after some time for hosting still have to pay. What about the FREE SITE?! We wanted to make a totally free site. Yes, you can search the Internet for “free website builder with hosting”, “free cloud hosting and website templates” and so on. But today we’re talking about a website that you make for free, but put it on your own domain and paid hosting.
Why are we discussing this particular option? We think that the cost of the site name / domain – 150 rubles (2$ for .ru) and up to 1000 (20$ for .com / .org) and 1000 rubles a year (20$) for hosting is not much money for your own site, which no one will not put their advertising without your knowledge and your site will be completely in your hands. Usually, when they talk about creating a site for free, they mean exactly this scheme – buying a domain name, payment for hosting and FREE creation of the site itself on a free engine (cms). After all, the cost of creating your site are mainly the development of design, structure, etc. So the cheapest site will cost 5 000 rubles, it will be a small site without much customization. More or less decent little website or blog can be ordered for 20-40 thousand rubles.
We will make the site ourselves from scratch. To do this, you need to choose a suitable content management system (CMS) – a kind of program or website builder, where you can easily create a website with your own hands, without a single line of code. Working with CMS resembles the work in WordPress, everything is done with a click of the mouse, the interface is clear and simple. We recommend that for most tasks to try WordPress – a free engine, it is quite powerful, open source, it makes programmers around the world for people who want to make your own site, but do not really want to bother.
Where do I get WordPress and how do I get started with it?
First, you need to download the distribution of wordpress from the official site to your computer, then download this file to the hosting and unzip it, while installing wordpress on hosting you come up with a login and password to log in to your site (save it somewhere!). You do it all with a couple of mouse clicks, just like you install Skype on your computer. Everything is done for you, just click “next, next, ok”. There is an important point about access settings when unpacking and installing WordPress, if you know these settings can better protect your site from possible attacks or hacking. This is a more professional level, so let’s talk about configuring accesses separately. If you are a normal user, the default setting is fine for you.
Once you’ve unpacked and installed WordPress on your hosting and set a name and password, you can go to your site http://(your site) – and you won’t see anything at first. To get into the admin area of WordPress by default you should add /wp-admin after your site name, that is you should type http://(your site)/wp-admin and you will see a login panel on your site, where you should enter your login and password, which you’ve created yourself earlier (you didn’t forget to write it down?!). What to do if you forgot your password for the site, we’ll discuss another time. I hope you were able to get in!
Yay! Here you are inside your future site. First, you need to go to Appearance -> Themes and choose your favorite design for the site. This is the most enjoyable moment of the site, do not worry, this theme can always be changed. Farther I think you’ll figure it out yourself, poke different sections, begin to adjust the appearance, add pages and records. It looks very simple, but as usual there are some tricks, which we will talk more about in the following articles. Congratulations! You made your first website on your own and for free. I envy you a little, it’s a special feeling to see your first website made with your own hands, to write your first post.
Write in the comments how you got to make a site.
See you around!