How does a website work? (part 2)

In my first post I explained to you how a website is not all that different really from a normal document or set of documents.

As promised, in my second post I’ll explain briefly how you make web pages and get them on to a live website for all the world to see. Let’s assume you’ve now got a domain name and some server space and that they’re live and ready to use.

When you key your web address in to a browser, you’ll likely see a ‘holding page’ from your web hosts. This is a temporary page saying something like ‘one of our clients has registered this domain’. When you create your site, this will disappear.

So to get your site built and live you need to do two things:

• Build some web pages
• Copy them to your web server so people can view them

There are two main ways to achieve this:

• Buy a piece of software for creating page layouts such as DreamWeaver and use it to build web pages on your own computer. Then when you’re happy with them, upload the pages to your web server.
• Or instead you could use a Content Management System (CMS). Instead of building the pages on your computer, then uploading them, this is a piece of software that you upload to your web server, which then allows you to build and edit your own site.Best of all you can log in to your site and do this from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

So which is the best approach? Well that all depends on your circumstances.

DreamWeaver is a great piece of software giving you virtually endless possibilities. It’s not cheap though, and it does take a lot of learning, but professional web designers who’ve designed sites with it for years, swear by it. So if you have enough cash to hire a professional web designer and you really need a great looking site and don’t have the time to build one yourself, that may be the best option for you. They may well build your site using DreamWeaver.

If you’re more of a beginner though, using a CMS can be a better option. For this site, and for clients, I tend to use WordPress. Although it doesn’t have the capabailities of DreamWeaver, it is easier to learn and use relatively quickly. And there’s another great thing about WordPress – it’s totally free.

So you simply buy a hosting package and a domain name, and get WordPress uploaded to your server (most hosts will even do this for you), and you can then use WordPress to build your site from scratch, and then add, delete and edit your pages. You can even include a blog within your site.  WordPress actually is a piece of blog software that’s evolved so far  you can now build an entire website with it, so the blog capabilities of it are great.

You can even, reasonably easily add photos from your computer and include them within specific pages or blog posts. The options for layout are a bit more limited than with DreamWeaver, but it’s still easy to design a great looking site cheaply.

And WordPress is not the only free CMS – there are others like Joomla! and Drupal. I’ve never used Joomla, but I’m learning Drupal at the moment, and so far I’m really impressed with it.

So, that gives you a rough idea of what it takes to build a simple website or blog. As you can hopefully now see, it needn’t be massively complicated or expensive to get a decent looking site produced.

Related posts:

1. How does a website work?
2. How do you get website visitors?
3. How does blogging benefit your business?
4. Pay per click advertising – running campaigns that work
5. How QR Codes work and how you could use them in your marketing