- 1). Choose a web host, but choose carefully. Check out a few of the more popular hosts, such as Weebly.com, Webs.com, and Yola.com., or try out some new and innovatives sites such as Wix.com and Moonfruit.com. The latter are flash-based (built using Adobe Flash, a popular animation platform) and offer some cool technical effects.
Since all of these sites are free, try out several of them before choosing your favorite. The only negative side-effect will be some spam e-mail arriving in your in-box; however, if you make a special e-mail address for this pupose, that problem will be solved. Decide which of these interfaces provides the look and feel of the window and tool-set that you like best, then start building. - 2). Create the overall "outline" or map of your site. Every web site has a home page and extra "pages" that exist in a sort of sub-heirarchy beneath the home page. They can have pages that are beneath them, too, very much like a web, or tree diagram with different levels of importance. In fact, it doesn't hurt to draw out the diagram of pages you'd like to create before beginning to make your site.
- 3). Choose a "theme" or "template" that you believe will exemplify the type of site you want to create. These two technical terms are used almost interchangeably by many sites to describe the background images and window graphics/styles that are available to the user. Some have a clean, businesslike look (using, say, a large font and a simple illustration), while others are scenic (a pristine beach), provocative (battlefield scene), or just plain silly (e.g. clowns).
Themes and templates are usually shown in thumbnail, or mini-picture form, so you can see a preview of all of the "looks" you can install on that particular site. Each of the hosts described above offers dozens, if not hundreds, of templates or themes, which should allow you to make your site stand out. - 4). Create your home page. Add any content--text, pictures, and/or gadgets (also called "widgets") such as music or video players, that you would like a visitor to see when he or she first reaches your site. Upload any files that are needed, and, using the software provided by the site, arrange them so that the most important information is seen as soon as the home page opens.
- 5). Add extra pages, one at a time. Try to create a new page only when you have time to finish it, because a technical anomaly found on many sites will automatically take online visitors to your new, uncompleted, web page first. This happens because the hyperlink to the newest page is automatically created in the navigation bar on your front page.
- 6). Freshen your site regularly via the "Publish" command, which is equivalent to the "Save" command on a word processor, If you work on your site but forget to publish it, your changes will likely be lost.