Creating your own website can be an exciting venture, however it can also be an overwhelming task. I often say to our clients that if you are creating a personal website like a blog or family website, designing your own website would be the best way to go, as the labour is free and it adds a personal touch to the website. However, if you want to create a business website or any kind, I highly recommend that you rather pay a professional web designer that can give your business a professional image that can be marketed on the internet.
There are many tools out there that can be used to create websites, some are free and others are not.
A free one that is easy to use is “NVU”. You can download it from http://www.net2.com/nvu/download.html
The preferred paid web design software now days (and my personal choice of software) is “Adobe Dream Weaver”. This software I would rather not recommend to a novice though.
Many beginners start off with “FrontPage” which comes with Microsoft Office. This is a very easy software package to use and comes with some easy templates to start with. The disadvantage to this package is that it does not produce clean code like what NVU or Dream Weaver. It often creates a lot of extra folders and files than is really necessary. When transferring the files to the web host’s server, it can take longer than usual, because there are so many folders and files to upload.
Once you have chosen the web design software that you are going to build your website, you will need to choose a FTP program. FTP means “File Transfer Protocol”. It is the means in which your computer will communicate with the web hosting company’s server, where you website data will be stored. A very easy and reliable (and free) program to us is “FileZilla”. You can download it from http://filezilla-project.org/. Once you have downloaded and installed FileZilla, open it up. It will be like Windows Explorer. One the left hand side you have the files on your computer, on the right you have the files on the web server. Simply drag and drop the files on to the server to get your website up and running.
That’s it in a nut shell. Have fun.
