5 Essential Things/Steps to Know Before Setting up a Website

Here are some essential things to know before choosing your domain name(s), choosing a hosting provider, and determining your website needs.

Don't start a web site without knowing these basics.

5 Essential Things/Steps to Know Before Setting up a Website:
1. DOMAIN NAME
A domain name is the unique address that identifies your web site's location on the Internet. This is often referred to as your URL.
ESSENTIAL STEPS:
+ Register your website domain address with ".com". A dot com domain name will look more professional.
+ How do I get one? Domain names must be registered through an authorized domain name registrar. The registrar is the company that sets up your new domain name for you (i. e. GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc.).
+ Check to see if your chosen name is still available. Someone may have registered this before. You can check it on the registrar's website.
+ After registering a domain. Before you can use your domain name, it has to be connected to your web host.

2. WEB HOSTING
Before your website can be visited on the internet, you have to copy its files onto a computer server operated by a web host. You can choose a free web hosting (which is a very unprofessional look for a business) or a paid hosting (which provides you with more features). The web host is the company that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by you (i. e. HostGator, MediaTemple, etc.).
+ Free Web Hosting: It's offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting.
+ Shared Web Hosting: Your website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite extensive. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller. This is generally the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance. Fast servers are the order of the day when it comes to websites that see heavy traffic. If you use shared web-hosting services you might well exceed the bandwidth allotted to you when there is a huge influx of traffic.
+ Reseller and Dedicated Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows you to become a web host yourself. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. With a dedicated hosting service, you can get your own web server and gain full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows). With a dedicated hosting, there's no more limitation in bandwidth usage, it's more secured with better performance, However, a dedicated hosting usually requires more technical-savvy specialist to monitor it.

ESSENTIAL STEPS:
+ For a personal website/blog, small business website, you can choose a shared web hosting. Shared hosting is cheaper and more affordable compared to dedicated hosting. Nowadays, you can find shared hosting with the price of $4 to $15 per month.
+ You'll need to know the DNS Servers. These addresses have to be attached to your domain name at your domain registrar’s website. The registrar will need these to know where to point your domain to. Once you have connected your domain with your web host. There's a process called “delegation”. It can take up to 48 hours for everything to become operational.
+ Bandwidth Limit Exceeded? When the amount of data transfer limit or the traffic limit that is allocated to any given month exceeds the allocated quota, it's time to move to dedicated hosting. By upgrading to a dedicated hosting service, you will ensure that your online business is taken care of and can handle the amount of traffic it gets each day.

3. CONTENT
Content is what information you want to put on your website. There are two types of websites; static websites and dynamic websites.
a. Static website
A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a client web browser. It is primarily coded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Many websites are static, meaning that the information doesn’t change. This may include information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, animations, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.
b. Dynamic website (Blog)
A dynamic website is one that changes or customizes itself frequently and automatically, based on certain criteria. A dynamic website can operate more effectively, be built more efficiently and is easier to maintain, update and expand. A dynamic site is one that is constantly changing, being updated with fresh content. Search engines also like dynamic sites better than static ones and rank dynamic sites better. It is also much simpler to build a template and a database than to build hundreds or thousands of individual, static HTML web pages.

4. DESIGN - TOOLS
+ Web Design
You can design your website with a web page editor or a free open source Content Management System (CMS), depending on what types of your website.
a. Static website
You can use Dreamweaver to add content to your pages; add assets and design elements such as text, images, movies, sounds, HTML links, and more. Dreamweaver provides tools for maximizing website performance and for testing pages to ensure compatibility with different web browsers. You can build a static website using Adobe Dreamweaver, Frontpage, MS Expression, etc. However, websites are becoming increasingly dynamic. Building static html pages may be outdated.
b. Dynamic website (Blog)
You can build a dynamic website (blog) using one of the popular CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

+ Graphic Design
You'll need a graphics editing program to design your logo, page layout, background, typography, and more. Adobe Photoshop is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software.

+ Source Code editor
A source code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs by programmers. You'll need a good text editor to edit CSS style sheets and web pages. CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

+ FTP client software
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, it is mainly used to send and receive files on the Internet. You can make a connection to the FTP server by using FTP client software. Once connected, you can do things such as uploading files (putting your own files on the server) to the server, downloading files (taking the server's files and putting them on your own computer) from the server, and renaming or deleting files on the server. FileZilla is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client.

5. COSTS
How much will you pay for a website? Here are some cost elements involved in the creation of a web site:
+ cost of the domain name registration (prices range from a few bucks to over $10 per year for .com names, depending on the registrar you use)
+ cost of the web hosting company to rent the server for hosting your website ($2 to over $100 per month, depending on the monthly bandwidth usage)
+ cost of the web designer - in case you do not set it up by yourself (ranges from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars). This article should save you from spending your hard-earned bucks, otherwise you must spend your time preparing all the necessary things.