Website Starting Point

This is where you should start for an introduction to building your first website. This is written so you can stop reading whenever you get too much detail. If the first section tells you all you need to know, you can stop there. Although there are ways to run a fine website on a computer in your garage, I will tell you what most people do.

The Big Three

The big three are the three things you should plan on purchasing to get your website up and running.

  • Domain Name Registration
  • Web Design
  • Web Hosting

Domain Name Registration

Domain names are the web addresses that end in '.com', '.net', '.org', and many more. Domain names must be registered at a domain name registrar. A good price for a domain name registration would be around $10 per year. Registration of the name make you the owner of the name, but doesn't mean there is a website at that domain or that there is email at the domain.

Web Design

The Web Design is the combination of text, images, programming, and stylesheets that are used to create your website. It is much more involved then typing a paper on a Word Processor. The price of the design varies from dirt cheap (and ugly as dirt) to extravagantly expensive (still possibly ugly).

Web Hosting

A Web Hosting Server is a computer that holds the files from your design. It delivers those files to computers (and other devises) when they are requested over the internet.

How it works?

This is a quick run-down. I am sitting at my home, sit at my computer, and type in the following web address:

http://www.handsomeweb.com
  1. My computer sends a request to my ISP's (Internet Service Provider's) DNS (Domain Name System) servers.
  2. My ISP's DNS server will look up the domain names' name servers in the registration information in the registrar's data.
  3. My ISP's DNS server will ask the name servers where my website is.
  4. The nameserver will tell my ISP's DNS Server the IP (Internet Protocol Address) address of my website.
  5. My ISP's DNS server will tell my computer that the proper IP address is 74.39.250.202. It is quicker to just go here: http://74.39.250.202, but it is difficult to remember all of those numbers.
  6. My computer will remember that number until this afternoon
  7. My computer will send the request for the page to the IP address, which is the location of my website files.
  8. My webhost computer will send an HTML document.
  9. My home computer will send the web host computer all the additional requests for the things needed to build my page.
  10. My computer puts the page together and lets me see it in my web browser.