How to Create a Website (2020 Edition) The essential step by step guide on how to set up a website

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning. It makes very few assumptions about what you know (other than the fact that you know how to surf the Internet, since you're already reading this article on the Internet). As some steps are more involved, this guide also links to selected relevant articles on thesitewizard.com that you will need to click through to read for more information.

Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is comparable to renting office or shop premises for your business. There are many issues involved in selecting a good web host. Read up on the things you need to look for in the article How to Choose a Web Host. One factor that may influence your choice is the decision on whether to use SSL for your website. A site that uses SSL will have a web address starting with "https://" instead of "http://". In ancient times, webmasters typically only bothered to use it if they were selling goods and services and needed to collect credit card numbers, or if they had some sort of facility that required their visitors to log in with a password. Nowadays, however, the whole of the Internet is slowly moving to a state where everything has SSL. As such, it is a good idea for new websites to use it from the very outset. This will allow you to avoid the hassle and risk involved in moving an existing website from HTTP to HTTPS, which you may find yourself doing in the future if you don't get it done at the beginning. For more information, please read the first few sections of that article, namely those explaining what SSL is (in greater detail), and the advantages and disadvantages of it. In general, as far as I know, all commercial web hosts let you install SSL certificates for your site. The price varies, though, from company to company. Some give you a certificate for free. Others will install a free certificate for a one time charge. Some require you to buy a commercial certificate (which has a recurring charge). You may want to factor this when comparing the prices of the different web hosts.

When you have an idea of what to look for, go to the Budget Web Hosting page to look for a web host. After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain name to that location. Information on how to do this can be found in the guide How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website (Or What to Do After Buying Your Domain Name).

Testing Your Website Although I list this step separately, it should be done throughout your web design cycle. I put it here to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform it adequately. You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major web browsers. These days, this means checking your site in Chrome or any of its derivatives, Firefox, as well as your mobile phone. The newest version of Microsoft Edge, released on 15 January 2020, also qualifies as a Chrome derivative, so if you have that, you can use it instead of installing Chrome. The desktop browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Edge) are all available free of charge. Note that different brands of mobile phones do not actually have the same browser. Alas, unlike the desktop browsers, phones aren't normally free. As such, just test your site with whatever phone you happen to have. That said, if you have access to both an iPhone as well as an Android, check your site with both. For those who have the time, you may also want to test using Internet Explorer 11, which is still in use by some people (such as those using Windows 8.1 and earlier). For those who don't have the required Windows version (for example, because you use a Mac or a later version of Windows), you can get a piece of software called a virtual machine, which mimics a completely separate computer running within your real computer. Microsoft provides packages containing both the required Windows version and different versions of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, free of charge, which you can run in your virtual machine to test your site. If you are interested in doing this, read in the article How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine for more details. If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called "HTML" and "CSS", has no syntax errors. You don't actually need technical knowledge of HTML and CSS to validate the page, since you can use one of the numerous free web page validators around to do the hard work. On the other hand, if the validator tells you that your page has errors, it may sometimes be hard to figure out what's wrong (and whether the error is actually a serious one) if you don't have the requisite knowledge. Having said that, some validators actually make suggestions on how to fix the error.