This article will provide some insight into how you can create your own website, from deciding on a domain name (www.mysite.com), finding a good web host and how to publish your website using ftp.

The Process in a few easy steps:

• Decide your website name.
• Decide which type of website you want to run, HTML or a script cms type.
• Find a hosting provider that satisfies all your web site systems requirements, php, mysql etc.
• Research your keywords and keyword phrases.
• Perform some basic search engine optimisation on your website front page content.
• Publish your web site using ftp.
• Prepare extra content for your website.
• This is the very last you do and only once! Submit your web site to the major search engines.

Decide on your web site name

The first thing you must do is to think about your website topic and target audience. This will help you decide on an appropriate title and description that you think will appeal to them. This will also enhance your search engine placement if your website name contains some of your topical keywords.

For instance if you wanted to sell shoes on your website you may look at a website name of www.shoes.com or something with the keyword of shoes in it. It may be better to narrow your target by including some other keywords in the name. If you were thinking about selling ladies fashion shoes then a name like www.ladiesfashionshoes.com would be much better.

The other simple alternative is to think of a short name that is easy to remember, you can take care of the keywords aspect in your web site title and description meta tags and your front page content. (more about meta tags in another article).

After you have decided what the website name is going to be, the next step is finding out if the name you want is available You can use a domain checker tool to find this out. Try this link to get you started. Use this tool to find out if the domain name you want is available. It will also suggest some alternative domain names if the one you want is not available.

Which type of website, HTML or CMS?

If you decide that you want to run a website using HTML web pages then the server requirement will be minimal. Any hosting service will probably be suitable for HTML as this has no special requirements. All you will need is a good HMTL editor to write your web pages. This is a bit like using Microsoft Word except that it codes your pages in the HTML language for you in the background. It will help if you know something about HTML if you are going to use this method of publishing your web site.

A CMS on the other hand does not require any kind of HTML knowledge or other web programming knowledge for that matter. You upload it, configure it then input your content via your web browser using built in editors in your website. If you want to use a CMS for your web site you will need to think about a few things.

For example if you use Joomla cms then the web host provider must be able to provide php and mysql. Php (Hypertext Pre-Processor) is a web language (which Joomla is written in) and mysql is a supporting database. A php website uses Linux running an Apache HTTP server supported by mysql database. There are many types of web server databases but MySql is probably the most popular.

You can find an open source (free scripts) to run almost any application type, a cms like Joomla or Mambo, a personal web blog like WordPress or some commercial scripts like osCommerce or Agoracart or free-shopping-cart all of which are free open source online shopping scripts and many more. All these scripts will have their own specific hosting requirements so pay close attention to these before you appoint your web hosting provider just to be sure they are compatible.