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Starting Your Website

These days, most business owners own an online website ran by either their company or another web hosting and design company. You may be asking what the big deal about online websites for companies it... The simplest way of answering that question is money. By posting their information on the web, they are exposing their company to millions of internet users, which in turn could lead to possible profit.

There are many important aspects of creating a good website that will make you sales and money. I'll explain these step by step, now. Keep in mind, that it's always helpful to put your ideas down on paper when trying to design a site.

Finding a category for your website. If this is your first time building a website, you're going to want to determine a category that your website will fit into i.e. (shopping technology, local cities or even a personal website about your hobbies.)

Framework. This is one of the most crucial aspects of building a site because what you choose to do will be the back bone of your website. When deciding what to go with, you want to make sure that you keep the company or website's future in mind. You'll want to ask your self a few questions.

1. Is the company going to grow in the future?
2. Are we going to constantly have to update information?
3. I don't know how to code HTML.

If you've answered yes to any of those questions, chances are you'll need a CMS or Content Management System. A CMS will organize, store and display all your content for you.  When using a CMS, you don't need any coding experience, most CMS's use WYSIWYG editors.  Personally, my favorite CMS is WordPress (with a few choice plugins). WordPress is just so diverse, I'm pretty sure it was made to have so many uses. You're probably saying "No way, WordPress is a blog platform." That's true, but you can do way more than blog with it. See the articles below for more WordPress tutorials.

Some of the CMS out there are Joomla, Jaws, Concrete and more can be found and demoed at OpenSourceCMS. Normally, when you install a CMS, they come with a bunch of premade designs. So dependnig on your knowledge level, you can pick a cool theme and even modify it to your liking if possible.

Once you've decided what your website will be about and what you will use for the foundation (you can always design it yourself, but I'm assuming that you don't know how since you're reading this) all you need to do is come up with a nice, catchy name for your site. If you can't come up with a name, try NameThingy.com, this tool will show you different combinations of all types of words and if you like one, it will even check the domain availability.

Making it happen. Now that we have a name, genre of website and a backbone to run it, we need to find a host for it. There are many great hosting companies out there that offer really good plans. You just need to keep in mind that if their servers are unreliable, your website will be down a lot. Choose a reputable company that has good deals. If you're a beginner, a good feature to look for would be cPanel with Fantastico. Cpanel is a great user interface to manage important aspects of your website. Fantasitco is a one click installer tool for popular scripts.

If you purchased a hosting account with cPanel and Fantastico, log into cPanel, go to Fantastico and click on one of the platforms you would like to install.

This article will be continuously updated.

How to build a website (Advanced users)
How to use WordPress
How to use Joomla

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