How to Make Your First Website – ( Full Guide )
Making your first Blog..
Hello Guys,
I am Kamruddin and I do get this question a lot about how to make a website without having coding knowledge.
First of let me tell you that you can make website without having any coding knowledge at all. I will try to explain this as briefly as possible and will use as simple language as I can so that everyone can understand this. And this should be fun, so grab a cup of coffee as this will be a long post. 🙂
First thing you all have to understand which platform do you want to choose to make your first website.
Now before you get confused about “What is a platform” and all, I will try to put this in ease. A platform means which service will you use to make your first website.
The obvious choices are WordPress, BlogSpot, Joomla etc. To my opinion WordPress is best. It is simple, easy to understand and requires almost no coding knowledge.
Now do understand this that you can make Blogspot and WordPress blogs for absolutely free if you are using their host. Meaning your blog will be named something like “XXXX.blogspot.com” if you are using blogspot & “XXX.wordpress.com” if you are using wordpress. But we are not going to go with free domains and use their host. We will make our first with our own domain name and we will self host them so that we can own our property and have full rights to out website.
Anyways, for this guide, we will be using WordPress as our platform because it is super easy to use and very reliable. So, keep reading.
Getting Started
OK, so we will be covering up the following topics in this guide :
- How to buy a Domain name for your WordPress Blog.
- How to buy a Hosting for your Blog.
- How to Connect your Domain with Hosting.
- How to install WordPress for the first time.
- How to create your MySQL database for your Blog.
- Things you need to know after you are making your first blog.
- Essential WordPress Plugins to install.
- How to grow your website quickly.
- Essential SEO and stuff.
That’s all you need to get started first. And do understand this that you need a little start cash to start up (Around $10-20) and that’s all. Just to register your first domain name and hosting. ( All explained below, so do not panic about they are )
What is a Domain name ?
You don’t need any rocket science to understand and nor I am going to tell you history about this. In simplest term, the name of the website which you put in address bar of your browser is domain name. For example: Google.com, yahoo.com, geekofreak.com etc
So you need a name for your website. So if it’s your first website then I want you to name it as your name .com . For example, my name is Kamruddin so I want my first website to name as kamruddin.com or any name which you want other people to open in their internet. Choose this name very wisely as this is the name you want everyone to remember.
Now How to register your first Domain Name & where to register your first domain ?
Again, I will try to make you understand this as simple as possible. You need some money to do this ( Not more than $10 ) & rest is easy peasy.
So basically, to get your domain registered, you need a domain registrar where you will get your domain name registered. In short, from where you will get your domain name officially.
Now, there are many domain registrar in internet but the best ones are Godaddy & Namecheap.com.
Sign up and register your first domain in NameCheap.
So simply head over to one of those website, I am using namecheap to show how to register a domain name as example, you will see something like this, just enter your domain you need to register and press search.
Now if the name is available, you can straight put that into cart and checkout, and your domain will be registered and ready to use.
Next, you do need a hosting.
What is hosting and from where to get one for my website ?
OK, so before you get confused or scared reading these new terms, please do know that they may sound technical but they are all very simple to understand. Hosting is nothing but a place to store all your website’s files and database. In short, you are buying some space for your website.
Now before buying a hosting, we do need the files which we want to upload in our hosting. So, we are using WordPress to make our first website. Head over to “WordPress.org” and download the latest copy of wordpress zip folder and save it in your computer. This zip folder will contain bunch of files which are needed to make your website, none of which are needed to understand right now. For now, just download and save it in your computer.
Next we do need to buy a hosting for our website, this will cost less than $10/month and to be honest this is all the invest you need to get started.
We will be using Hostwinds to get our hosting and to be honest this is one of the best hosting providers and currently our website is also using this hosting provider. There support system is awesome and have live chat to resolve all your issues instantly. So head over to Hostwinds and buy the business plan to get started which costs only $9.95/mo.
Sign up for Hostwinds for only $0.05Â (Coupon Code: geekofreak )
That’s all you need to get started and make your first website.
As soon as you register, you will get a bunch of email, but one email will contain the “Nameservers” details, please do note that as we will need it later.
Now first thing first. We need to connect Hosting and Domain together so that they can function together. Now when you first registered your hosting, I told you to to keep note of the “Nameservers” they provided you in the email. Generally “XXX.hostinds.com”, it looks like that and there will be 2 of them, nameserver 1 & nameserver 2. We do need both of them. Now copy these information and headover to Namecheap/Godaddy and click on your domain and you will see the option of nameservers or host records option, now they will have default settings chosen but just choose custom and you just paste those information in the blacnk field of Namerser 1 and Nameserver 2 and save it.
That’s all for the domain section. You really don’t need to do anything else in Namecheap/Godaddy after this except renewing your domain name every year. 🙂
OK, now we are very close to launch our first. Just few steps more.
Next, Go to the control panel of your hosting. You will get a bunch of information when you sign up with your hosting, and you can find control panel link, username and password in that email. So just use those details to login to your hosting control panel. It will look something like this:
Now simply follow the steps – I am mentioning.
– First, go to “Addon Domain” from your hosting control panel and add the domain name you registered.
– Next go to MySQL database -> Create a database (name whatever you want ) -> Create Database username and password -> Add user to database and set all privilege and you are done making the database part. ( It is needed to save all your website progress )
– Next, go to file manager -> public_html -> Your domain name ( This is the place where all your website files will be saved )
Just upload the wordpress zip folder here which you downloaded earlier and extract all files here.
Ok, literally 2-3 steps more before you launch your first site.
Now in the wordpress folder, you will find 1 file named “wp-config.php”. Edit this file with your favorite editor and Replace the database name, database user name and password like you set in MySQL database just now and save it.
That’s it you are done.
Next, simple open your website, set website name, provide the database information like above and install. Your website should be installed.
Next is updating your website, design etc. For that simply head over to yourdomain.com/wp-admin and create new post. And from appearance you can select new theme of your blog.
We will talk about plugins, themes, SEO etc in our next articles.
Was it that hard? To set up your new website ? And Imagine just to do this, companies takes thousands of dollars from you. Well, they can’t trick you any more 🙂
Have fun!