1. Choose a theme: This is the main idea on which your website will focus on, it may be anything from technology, politics, business, tips and tricks or even your personal blog. Just make sure that you are familiar with the theme of the website you are going to publish.
2. Make a plan: Building a website is going to take a lot of your commitment, energy and also money. So the first thing you are required to do is to plan out your strategy of website like the domain name you are going to use, the title of your website or blog, how are you going to organize things in your website etc.
3. Make it happen: Now that you have the basic idea of how your website is going to be its time to put them into practices. Get sufficient knowledge on how websites going to work and what all work you need to do once it is set up, I will brief you over some of them here
- It is very difficult to create a website from scratch using some programming languages like PHP, ASP, Perl and it requires intense knowledge of database if you are really going to do it. So instead if you are a beginner just choose a platform like Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal etc which are available as open source Content management system to publish your content. The main advantages of such CMS are of course you don't need to code anything and requires very little knowledge of programming and databases.
- Choose a hosting: Now that you have got your domain ready (you can register a domain of your choice at any of the registrars, and I prefer godaddy.com as chosen by millions of other webmasters), and you have followed all the above steps, you need to find a place where you will actually store your files and pictures which will run the website. If you are really short of funds for running the website and yours is not a production website which depends on huge traffic then you may well opt for free hosting but it has its own cons though it will come for no cost to you. Otherwise there are numerous good hosting sites on the net which will help you to put one step forward in making your site live (I prefer hostgator.com as they have one of the best customer support).
- Learn HTML: HTML looks complicated—it's hard at first, but once you get the feel of it, it's not that difficult.
4. Inspect your website: Before you make your site live to the web audience make sure that everything is in place and working correctly. Check whether your site's template looks neat to your visitors, check for broken links, missing tags, flaws in widgets or other modules. Once you are done with it you may need to submit your website for a full index of Google via your sitemap which may be generated using many tools available with the software or online websites.
5. Define your goals: Be aware of the kind of website you are going to run, it may be for fun and recreation like personal blogs which has posts related to your interests, hobbies or some other works related only to you or it may be a high traffic driven ecommerce or profit oriented website. So whichever may be your website you need to give attention accordingly, if your website needs high traffic to sell your products then you may have to plan for further optimization of keywords, SEO and also look for advertizing. If you plan for a personal blog then the above mentioned things are not necessary.
6. Advertise: This is the great tool and potential of internet which will allow your website to be known to many people in quick time and to get instant high traffics to site which will propel your web development idea and business. There are many ways in which you can advertise your website to reach the audience you want. Once you are aware of the kind of people you are targeting for the website, you have to plan on how to reach them with your websites' content. Some of the techniques for advertizing your websites are:
- Submit your website to some of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. You need not take troublesome work for doing this; there are numerous websites available which will do this task effortlessly for you and very soon your website will find its place in the search engines.
- Publicize it to your friends on social media. Twitter and Facebook are the great tool to tell your friends about your work and website. So just tweet about your website/blog or post status updates about them regularly so that your friends will be constantly in touch with the content you are publishing.
- Use others websites and blogs for advertising yours by writing constructive things about them and asking for signature links in their forum or blog. This is a way of helping each other out wherein you can post about them in your website also along with expecting reciprocal link back from them.
- If you are selling your products via ecommerce and marketing website then you may need to consider advertizing your products over other website which may require spending money for those. You may consider marketing your website through Google AdWords or Facebook advertizing tool.
7. Provide Quality content and service: First of all once you are running your website smoothly you will have lots of readers and people who visit your blog/website regularly so ask them for a feedback about your website and collect their reviews. Based on them take serious actions which will push your website even further in terms of providing quality content to the audience. Think about your visitors to your website: their needs, their frustrations, their circumstances. As much as possible, seek to make their lives easier or more informed.
8. Page Speed: This is one of the widely discussed topics regarding websites throughout the internet world. Of course the main thing which will catch the eye balls of your visitors is the catchy elements like media, audio, video, slideshow and other flashy objects based on JavaScript, but at the same time you need to be wary of the fact that these elements require extensive load times and put load on the server as far as the number of requests are concerned. So at the time of providing neat and presentable look to your people you will have to consider this major factor of site load time and keep it around 3-7 seconds max to allow your visitors have a n enjoyable experience through your website.
9. Entirely own the content you publish: You may be attracted at the way some of the other publishers are posting their content in their website and want to use some or entire of their work in your blog/website. But this is not the way to move forward. Try to be of your own for all the things you are going to publish in your website be it for photos, videos or a Para of information. In case you need any data from others website ask them for due permission and use them by giving them credit otherwise they may sue you for that.
10. Be in touch with experienced guys: There are lots of professionals out there who are willing to help you in case you are struck somewhere in this process for little monetary benefits. Or you may think of consulting developers who have vast knowledge In this field by posting messages in online forums and portals reserved for webmasters who will help you solve issues regarding your website which you may encounter once you start running your website.