So, you have finalized the design of your site. Every missing end tag has been found, both your HTML and CSS validates and every critique comment has been applied. So what next…?
For a lot of people, getting your site up and running is one of the hardest and most confusing things they have to do, so let’s take a look at what you need to do.
- First thing you need to do is register a Domain Name, this is the actual name of your site, eg. www.google.com. You can check that the one you want is available and purchase it from many sites such as names.co.uk, 123-reg.co.uk, godaddy.com, and networksolutions.com. If you have any trouble, all these sites have good FAQs that will give you plenty of information.Tip – choosing a domain name relevant to your site/business will help in getting good search engine results.
- After purchasing your domain name, the next step is to choose a hosting company. In simple terms, these are huge memory banks that you rent space on to put your site online. There is an endless list of web hosts and prices you can pay depending on the features you will need. The most important things you should look for are:
- Disk space – This is the physical amount of space you will receive on the host’s server. The amount you will require depends on the size of your site. The most common forms of data stored are images, videos and others such as CSS and PHP files. The actual web pages do not take up much space on their own, for example, the home page of this site is only 0.015 MB.
- Bandwidth – is another word for data transfer rate – the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another, i.e. from your host’s server to your browser. If you have a webpage which in total is 50Kb, each time a user opens this page you will use 50Kb of your bandwidth allowance. So, if you have 100 visitors per day, then each day you will use 5Mb of your allowance, equating to 150Mb a month. The good thing however, is that you can use the same image more than once, then the user only has to download this file once only, and it is saved temporarily to the user’s machine. Techniques such as using a very small file for the background of your site and repeating it will save you a lot of bandwidth.
- PHP/MySQL support – These features can be very useful. These allow for member sites and easier control for your site. For more information about these please look at the relevant sections on this site.
- Customer support – What support do they offer if the worst happens? Look around on the internet for reviews.
- Price – This is important for anyone looking for hosting.
The best thing to do is determine what features you will need, and then look around for the best deals; some good sites are dream-hosting.co.uk and fortunecity.com/.
Tip – in a lot of hosts you really get what you pay for, a £2 a year host is cheap, but the customer service and uptime is likely to be low. Spending a bit more money on a better host will pay off in the long run.
Tip – the internet is a great place to look for reviews and testimonials of hosting companies.
- Once you have set up your domain name and assigned this to your hosting plan (your host will give you detailed individual instructions and help on how to do this), the next thing to do is to actually get your files online. The easiest way to do this is by using an FTP Client, (File Transfer Protocol if you’re interested), that connects to your host’s server and puts your files online. Many HTML editors such as Dreamweaver and PSPad have clients built in allowing you to upload directly from your editor. There are also stand-alone programs that you can get such as FileZilla and Smart FTP.Tip – some hosts have site management software such as cPanel, allowing you to upload your files from their website without the need for a FTP client.Tip – as long as your web page names consist of alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], you can call them whatever you want. However, your homepage must be called index.(php/htm/html), as browsers recognize this as the default home page. Spaces in names are strongly advised against as some servers cannot process this.
Tip – if you want to call your page “contact us” for example, it is much better to call it “contact-us” rather than “contact_us”, as these are read better by search engines.
Your site is now online. Good luck with your new website and remember to update it often. For troubleshooting any problems, there is always plenty of advice in the forums.
