Building a website can be more than confusing. You’ll have to make numerous decisions, and if you don’t have an education in web design, the situation becomes even more befuddling. How do you build a website? What steps should you follow?

Here, you will learn how to build a website by following the simple steps laid out below. Creating a website does not have to be full of hair-pulling frustration, it can actually be quite simple.

Step One – What’s Your Type?

The first thing that you’ll need to do is to determine what type of website you need. This will be determined by what sort of business you own, or what you hope to achieve with your website.

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For instance, you can create a brochure website in a very short time, but these are not comprehensive websites, but rather are more akin to direct mail.

A catalog website is what you’ll need if you intend to offer a range of products/services to your customers.

If your website will be more informational in nature, then you’ll need to take that into account and use Wordpress or Blogger as your website content management system (CMS).

Step Two – Your Domain Name

You will need to have a domain name for your website, as well. This will be the “abcdefg.com” that your customers type in or click on through search engines to find your website.

Your domain name is important! When at all possible, you should make it the same as your company’s name. However, there are instances where this is not appropriate. Usually, when you try to keep your domain name as simple, memorable and short as possible.

You should also consider purchasing multiple domain names in .com, .biz, .info, .org, etc in order to keep your competition from getting them and to capitalize on visitor mistakes. Finally, consider registering misspelled variants of your domain name for the same reason.

Step Three – Website Hosting

Now that you know what sort of website you want, as well as what domain name you want, you’ll need to consider website hosting. Your webhost will be responsible for maintaining (and often for creating) your website.

When considering website hosting, you must consider the amount of uptime the host experiences. If they only experience 99% uptime, then you should find one with 99.5 or 99.9% uptime. Any downtime will result in lost profits, as your website will be inaccessible to your customers and in some occasions will harm your efforts to increase page rank.

Part of considering webhosts is the question of website design. Many of these webhosts offer website templates that can be used to get your site up and running quickly. While this might be a simple solution when you need to build a website fast, it is not always good for the long term.

It’s better to find a professional designer, or a webhost that offers professional design as well as hosting. Often, you can also find a webhost that gives you access to a building a website tutorial.

Step Four – Test, Test and Test Again

Once your website is just about ready to go live, you need to test every aspect of it. You need to ensure that all links work correctly (for seo and human visitors), that all graphics are displayed properly and that any interactive features are fully functional. If anything is not working correctly, you must repair it prior to going live.