Domain
First thing first, everything need to have a name and so does your website too. A domain is to recognize one’s website, whether it is a personal or corporate website. A domain name is something like abc.com, xyz.com, and abc-xyz.com etc. To register a domain name, simply go to one of the online domain registration website and get one for less than $15 per year. I personally like to use GoDaddy.com for domain registration. It is simple and easy to manage all your registered domains under the same account.
Hosting
Next you need to register a hosting account for your website. Hosting companies provide service of digital storage to store all the files of your website, also called hosting service. There are millions of hosting companies out there and they offer different hosting packages. Which one to be chose depends on the types of website that you have. For a simple personal website with only some daily blogging activities, a standard hosting package should be enough. For a corporate informational website, depends on how much data or files you have to put on your website, you may need a moderate level of hosting package which provides more storage capacities and more bandwidth etc. In case you are planning to run a larger scale website such as eCommerce, you may need an advance hosting package that provides large in both storage space and bandwidth, some other advance features such as SSL certificate installation, dedicated IP and server etc.
Now you have registered a domain name and a hosting account, next you need to create the main dish, the website. There are many ways to create a website easily and I am going to show you how to use a platform called WordPress to create your first website.
Content Management System (CMS)
There are lots of content management system on the market but majority of the people now use one call WordPress. WordPress is an online, open source website/blog creation tool written in programming language called PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
A lot of hosting company now they offer “1-Click” WordPress installation feature which means you can simply install the WordPress by just one simple click from the control panel of your hosting account.
The above image shows a screenshot of the control panel from BlueHost. Clicking on the WordPress installer icon will launch the installation for WordPress. Follow the instruction on the screen to fill out all the necessary information. The installer will run the WordPress installation based on the settings you provided. You will see a progress bar with the installation status. The installation process takes about 2 minutes to finished and now you are all ready to go.
