How do I build my own website?

First i suggest learning how to make a website on your own computer.
Google “HTML tutorial” and pick one you like and follow the steps.

Second, you need to decide where you want to host your website.

A) You can host it on your own computer basically for free. This however requires that you have a computer that is turned on 24/7, otherwise people won’t be able to access your website. If you want to follow this path, google for “setting up apache webserver”. You probably also want a fixed address to your website, there are plenty of free services which can offer a fixed name. www.no-ip.com is a good start.

B) You can have your homepage on a proffessional webhosting company’s server. This means you dont have to have a computer on all the time, but there is usually some small monthly fee (between 0 and 20 dollars/month is reasonable). Google for “webhosting service” and pick one that you like. They usually provide different amounts of space online and different advanced webprogramming support (support for ASP, PHP, ruby, databases and the likes).

If you want a url like www.blabla.com you also have to pay a small fee for registering and keeping a domain name, usually the webhosting company you choose help you with registering a domain name.

C) You could have your website on a free web hotel, again google for “free web hotel” or “free web hosting”.. These sites usually give you a sub-url to their main site, such as www.freewebhosting.com/blablabla .. This may look unproffessional but is a good way to get started with your site.. These sites have different ways of getting your stuff onto the net, ranging from WYSIWYG editors (like editing an ms-word document) up to allowing you to FTP your own documents and scripts. They usually have limited support for advanced scripting, PHP, databases and such, and usually don’t help you with registering a domain. If you wan’t to do it “for real” i suggest paying for web hosting and uploading your own HTML documents via FTP (and not using the WYSIWYG features).

Well that all depends on how good you want your website to be. You can register your domain name pretty cheap, less than 10 bucks (a year). Then you need a server. You probably want to pay someone for that too, sometimes the same people you buy your domain name registration from. Next you need to build a web page. There’s lots of software to build webpages available, much of it free. I haven’t used free software (or done much web coding at all) lately, so the only software I’m really familiar with is Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is expensive, but it will let you do anything you want and manage links and references for you. Whatever software you use, you don’t need to know HTML to build a basic site. Once you’ve built you pages you need to upload them to your server, if your paying for space on someone else’s servr they’ll provide all the information you need.

That will get you a very basic site. If you want something high quality – pay someone to do it. Or study web design, get some good graphic design software as well as web design software, learn how to structure your files, etc. etc. etc.

So short version: it’s easy and cheap if you aren’t worried about quality. It’s hard and/or expensive if you want a high quality site.

Thank you for your help guys

What do you want a website for? You can do plenty with a free Wordpress blog and still have your own domain name for it. You don’t really need to know any scripting/mark-up languages to get one going either (but it would certainly help to develop it).

weebly.com – check it out.

@anon I would like a website for a few things, my business being the main thing.

@pinky I say try out Wordpress. It so simple to update, you can have multiple pages and when you feel more confident you can always move it to paid-host. They have lots of plug-ins or “widgets” that you might find useful too, as well as themes that you can use to change the look-and-feel of your site (until you get well acquainted with CSS of course).

@anon How do you do it if you don’t know any coding or anything?

@pinky it basically does it for you. You just add the content to the various “pages” (which you create as many of as you need). It’s sort of like using a word processor.

Create an account (which takes about 10 seconds) and try it out. I have difficulty with technical explanations :(

@anon ok thank you for your help