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Developing a website: Building a site yourself

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Developing a website: Building a site yourself

The cheapest approach - if you already have an Internet Service Provider then they may provide a certain amount of space for free web hosting. This is a good place to practice your web building skills. There are however, drawbacks to hosting a professional site this way.

Because you can’t use your own domain name in this type of hosting package, you may can get in to strife if you change your Internet Service Provider because that would also mean changing your Internet Address

So rather than www.yourbusiness.com.au as the address you send people to, in this type of free service you would have to advertise and promote www.your-isp-name.com.au/mybusiness/ … not very friedly!

Apart from not looking very professional and promoting your ISP instead of your brand, this can get very costly if you change your ISP and you’ve already printed this on your stationery.

If you do have your own domain name and you have some free web space, one way around this problem is to use “web forwarding”. What this does is “re-direct” customers who type in your domain name to whatever Internet Address you wish. This means that you can change where your web site is hosted whenever you like without having to pay for a high-end hosting package - the only address you promote to your customers is and print on your stationery is www.yourbusiness.com.au.

If you are ready to go the next step and pay for a hosting service, you will need to source an Hosting Provider to host your website.

There are many, many resources online to help you learn how to design and develop your website. You can learn the basics of html, image manipulation and submitting your site to search engines.

If you are more technical then there is also web authoring software such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver that are extremely novice friendly and it’s not hard to learn the basics.

If you’d rather become more proficient, take advantage of the short courses offered by many Universities and Tafes. There are courses in web authoring, html, building your website from scratch and design for the web.

If your budget is really stretched you can always approach educational institutions and see if they have students willing to work on your site. You’ll probably find there are many students keen to gain more practical experience (and some extra cash!) You can advertise through the careers office or simply post up ads on the jobs boards. Make sure you get references from their lecturers or ask to see other work they’ve done. Remember to enter into a contract so you have some guarantee they will commit to the job.

You can also get help at any stage of building your site. If you think you’re over your head, get onto the Internet and find some like-minded people who can help you with your queries. You could join a newsgroup to ask questions about building your site. Remember, it’s never too late to get help. While it may cost you more than you’d planned, sometimes it’s worth calling in a professional to help you tweak the site at the end. You don’t want to waste all your hard work after all!

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