The Basic Steps for Building Your Own Web Site

By Bud E. Smith from Creating Web Pages For Dummies, 9th Edition

Perhaps you want your own Web site to advertise a business or product, but you think you have to spend money to hire a professional Web designer and coder. You could invest a lot of money in a Web site, but you can also create a simple site without spending much money at all.

Given the many ways you can work, and the way different Web sites and different tools handle some of the process for you, it’s important to understand the underlying steps that define Web publishing. The steps may have different names, or be intermingled with each other, but they’re always basically the same. Here they are:

Create the HTML text file that’s the basis for your Web page.
Create or obtain the graphic images you’ll use to spice up the appearance of your page.
Create a link to the graphics in your HTML text file so they appear where you want them to.
Preview your Web page on your own machine.
Find Web-server space.
Transfer the HTML text file and the graphics files to the Web server.
Check that your new Web page works correctly now that it’s online.

If you use an easy-to-use tool such as Google Page Creator, the steps given here are combined and most of the details are handled for you.

These steps are usually simple if you’re creating a basic Web page. However, they do get more complicated sometimes, especially if you’re trying to create a multipage Web site.

When you create a Web page that has complex formatting, or that mixes text and graphics, you’ll want to test it in the most popular Web browsers. You should download Microsoft Internet Explorer, the America Online client, the Firefox browser, the Opera browser, the Safari browser, and/or other tools.