You Want Your Own Website. Now What?
There's no shortage of options: You can hire someone to create the site or you can do it yourself. You can pay for website hosting or you can get it for free. And there's no right or wrong when it comes to answers because it all depends on what you need, how much work you're willing to do on your own, and what your budget is.
Angelfire and GeoCities have provided free websites for many years, usually with attached advertising that you may not want. And the free sites have generally been mundane in terms of features. This has changed, though, and if you're a do-it-yourself type, the number of choices you have has increased substantially.
One of the first things you need to decide is what you want the website to do. I was sitting in on a meeting recently with a website designer and a team from a large corporation that will remain nameless. The corporate team wanted to start with the look and feel of their proposed site and determine the operational mechanics later. I'm delighted to say that I'm not involved with this project in any way because it's doomed to failure unless the designer can convince the corporate team to stand their plan on its head.
If you don't know what the webiste is supposed to do, you're not going to be able to design a successful user interface. This is analagous to jumping into your car at the beginning of a vacation and driving without bothering to figure out how you're going to get from Columbus to San Francisco. You might eventually get there, but the outcome is more likely if you have some plans.
Once you've defined some goals, then it's time to determine how you want to build the website and where you want to host it. At the same time, you'll need to make some decisions about how much to spend.
Where The Website Will Live
Professional website hosting varies in price from around $50 per year to $300 per year for basic services. In other words, it costs Google a bit more than $300 per year to host its many services but people who host a few domain names on a site that's somewhere below the 1000 most popular sites on the Web, you'll expect to pay $50 to $300. Advertising-supported hosting, on the other hand, is "free", but you'll have to allow the hosting service to place ads on your page.
Paid services include operations such as GoDaddy (around $50 per year), BlueHost (around $100 per year), and Newtwork Solutions ($150 to $450 per year). Most hosting services offer extra-cost add-ons.
You'll also need to rent a domain name. TechByter.com is an example of a domain name and it's the one that I've rented. And it is a rental, not a purchase. I pay the registrar a fee every year to continue using the domain name. In most cases, the rental fee is modest—$10 to $20 per year—although some domain types carry much higher fees.