Yes, that’s right, I said “do it yourself” web site design! It has never been easier to create your own website. Gone are the days when your either had to be a guru in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or a budding Picasso. Using open-source solutions and a huge array of design templates available on the internet, why on earth would you hire a web site designer to create your web site?
I’ll be publishing a step-by-step guide of how to create your very own web site over the coming weeks and make sure you know everything you need to know, so that you’ll get the most out of your new web site. If you are commissioning a new web site, you might also find these articles interesting as they’ll explain some of the points that you should be discussing with your web site designer.
Introduction
This series of articles will guide you through the process from start to finish and include useful tips about what plug-ins to use for search engine optimisation and many other tips! We’ll be using WordPress – a popular open source Content Management System (CMS) – which is often used for blogs (like our own).
So lets get started …
Step #1 – registering your domain name
OK, the first thing you need to do is purchase a domain name, I would recommend UKReg, although there are plenty of others.
- Go to http://www.ukreg.com/ and use the tool at the top of the site “Register your domain name”. Simple type in your preferred domain name (see note below) and click the “Search” button.
- The next page that will be displayed will be titled “Domain availability & suggestions” and display a list of available domains (as shown below).
- Select the domain or try a different domain name (using the search tool at the bottom of the page) before registering your selected domain.
- Follow the on screen prompts and complete the contact details, etc., for your domain. I would recommend simply registering the domain, but not selecting the options to host the site, but that is entirely up to you. (In the next article I’ll be showing you how to configure your domain to point at a third party hosted server).
- Once you have registered the domain you’ll get various emails which are extremely important so keep them in a safe place! These will include you control panel details for accessing your domain’s management system.
I would recommend speaking to someone about choosing the domain name as you should try and use a domain that describes what you do, rather than your company name as this will help with the search engines later on. In hindsight we should have registered ayrmer-software.co.uk instead of ayrmer.co.uk, but have also registered intuitive-software-solutions.co.uk. Geographical information can also help, so when we did a web site for a bed and breakfast in Norfolk we were surprised to see bedandbreakfast-norfolk.co.uk was available. You’ll often find tourism based sites will use geographical optimisation of their domains, e.g. cornwall-holiday-cottages.co.uk or something similar.
It is also important to understand what some of the most common Top Level Domain (TLD) mean so that you select the most relevant one for your web site. Use .co.uk for a UK company and .com is for an international company. The TLD .org or .org.uk should only be used by charities; .gov and .gov.uk for government organisations. There are some new TLD’s like .co which people are jumping at, but this the TLD for Columbia (not really relevant for a UK business).
If a third party is registering your domain, make sure that they set you up as the registrant of the domain as the person or organization registering a domain name is also the recorded legal owner. Although most web site designers will do this without prompting I have come across some less scrupulous businesses that don’t!
Step #2 – setting up your domain hosting
In the next post we’ll look at setting up a domain host (if you didn’t select to host your site with UKReg) and then we’ll get started with the actual web site.
Tags: domain, open source, search engine optimisation, seo, web site design, wordpress
[...] tutorial published on Ayrmer Softwares blog that showed how easy it is to create a website – Do It Yourself (DIY) web site design – and will be used to vent my spleen, replacing Charlie rant (when I have time I’ll [...]
[...] our first two articles we showed you how to registering your domain name (Step #1) and setting up your domain hosting (Step #2). In this week’s article we’ll go [...]