This is part 1 in a series describing how to create your own website – see Gite websites for others.

I’m often asked if I can make websites for people, but unfortunately I never have the time, so I thought instead I would explain how to create your own gite website (or any other website). I won’t bother to explain your need for a business website, that’s probably self-evident nowadays.

There are plenty of people who will happily deprive you of your hard earned cash to produce a website for you. The main things that put people off from making their own websites are (1) cost and (2) technical challenges. Well, you can do it yourself, often just as well as the professionals, and you’ll hardly need to get your wallet out. And you’ll get more satisfaction and more control.

This is the first of a series of entries, one to be released each week for the next few weeks, that has a very clear goal – to enable anyone to make their own website, at minimal cost. Although the example I will use is a gite / holiday rental website the exact same principles apply to any business, so whatever your need for a website you will hopefully find it useful.

The general plan is is to show a different stage in the process each week in such a way that you can’t go wrong. I will give detailed instructions and when necessary provide the code that you need and tell you what to do with it!

Because keeping things cheap is one of our goals we are going to use free tools whenever possible (which is pretty much always). I’ll tell you where to find the tools and what to do with them!

The order of works is as follows (don’t worry if the headings don’t mean much at this stage):

1. Find a website name and organise hosting – this is the one stage where you will need to get your wallet out!
2. Get the tools, and get a very simple one page site online – what is ftp?
3. Turn your site into a five page website (once you have seen the principles you can go on to add as many pages as you like)
4. Make it look good – what is CSS?
5. Help the search engines find your site, also keywords, titles and descriptions to use
6. Improvements – adding a contact form

Once you are familiar with these basics the more complicated aspects will all fall into place without too much effort. The site we will make is a standard html website (i.e. not wordpress/blog based). This is much the best way to learn.

The first stage, being the only one you need to pay for, we might as well get out of the way right away so you are ready for the fun part to begin next week.

1) Find a website name and organise hosting

Hosting

I’m assuming you want a ‘normal’ type website – that is, a site called www.somethingoriginal.com (change ’somethingoriginal’ for, well, something original).

Every website needs what is called hosting – someone, somewhere has to hold (host) the website for you. If it is only on your PC no one is going to find it! There are hundreds of hosting companies around, some better than others, some cheaper than others.

The cheapest isn’t necessarily the best. You will find it much easier to use a hosting company that has a standard ‘control panel’ (user interface). We also want a hosting company that allows you to use something called PHP. This will be useful straightaway, and very useful for you in the months and years to come if you want to develop your site.

The possibility of using MySQL databases is also very useful – not for the example we are setting up, but indispensable in the future if you ever want to add a blog etc.

The hosting company we usually use ourselves is UK WebSolutions Direct. They are reliable (i.e. your site won’t disappear for days on end), their support desk is always very helpful when we have queries, and they are not very expensive (about £36 per year). If you don’t like the look of them search around, there are lots of others, and quite a few that cost less. Remember if you go somewhere else but you want to follow along with our guide make sure your hosting company has PHP enabled.

I will sometimes refer to the menu options used by UK WebSolutionsdirect but you will find that most hosting companies have pretty much the same options available.

Within the UK WebSolutions Direct hosting section choose the option ‘Host 1′. This has everything you need, and is the cheapest. Select ‘Order Now’.

Domain name

There is something else we need to do before we hand across our cash, and that is to choose a domain name…the domain name is simply your future website address e.g. www.francethisway.com. Having clicked on ‘Order Now’ you can select the option I would like to register a new domain name with you now and then look down the page – you will see something called ‘domain availability checker’.

Many names are no longer available so if you are hoping to buy google.com you will be out of luck. Hence it is necessary to check out a few names  to find one that both sounds good and is available.

You will notice the drop-down box in the same section for the TLD (ending, eg .com, .co.uk etc). Generally you are best going for .com if you want your site to be found in different countries, or .co.uk if you are targetting mostly a UK audience.

Try out lots of different names, and have a brainstorming session with your partner to think of others. Names can have hyphens. For example, the first name I tried, french-farmhouse-gite.com, is currently available. A name that bears some relation to your property is a good idea. Even better if it contains a word or two that people might search for in google. (If I wasn’t too busy I would buy french-farmhouse-gite.com myself, that’s quite a good name…).

You will note that you never actually own a domain name, you lease it for a set price each year – typically about £10 a year. When you have found the right name for you, go ahead and order it along with the hosting.

I hope that wasn’t too painful, either the name selection process or the paying!

It gets easier from now on – your only goal for the moment is to have organised hosting and a domain name before next weeks post. Meanwhile keep (and print out) the emails the hosting company sends you, they are important because they contain the passwords you will need to use the account.