What you need to build a website

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What you need to build a website

What you need to build a website
What you need to build a website
What you need to build a website.

Gone are the days when having a website is the preserve of big Institutions and Businesses. These days, almost everyone online wants to have a website in order to create a home on the Internet for their Businesses, ideas or projects to create awareness and reach wider audience beyond their current reach. By so doing, Businesses can generate more income from wider customer reach, ideas can be shared, transformed and enriched with greater connections and projects can become businesses through awareness, connections and reach to a wider audience far beyond what can be reached ordinarily.

Having a website is more or less a requirement for anyone who is starting out or wants to make changes for a better outcome in what they are currently doing, be it business or interest. Having a website these days is very easy with few basic requirements. You will need a web hosting company to provide you with your hosting services, while you provide your website contents depending on what your website is about. You might need someone to create your contents for you if you are unable to do it yourself or you might need a developer to develop your website from scratch depending on your requirements and purpose. These days, CMS has taken out the task of getting your website up and running, all you need is your contents and a bit of design and customisation to the CMS and you are ready to go.

Let’s dive into what the basic requirements are for your website to go live.

  1. Domain name
  2. Web hosting service provider
  3. web hosting package
  4. CMS
  5. SSL
  6. Your contents
  7. A developer

Domain name

A domain name is the name that uniquely identifies your website on the Internet. Your domain name gives you the address of your website on the internet. People need your domain name in order to be able to locate your website. Your website address is also referred to as a url that you type on to the address bar of your browser to get to your website.

The url (uniform resource locator) will normally look like this “https://www.domainname.com”.

The domain extensions “.com, .org, .net, .biz” are the most commonly used from the gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains), you also have the ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains) which are country specific domain extensions like “.uk, .co.uk, .com.ng, .ng”. There are also the NewgTLDs which include extensions like “.mobi, .tel, .academy” and more. Find out more about domains here.

Since domain name are unique, you will need to check out your chosen domain name for availability before you can have it registered and used on your website. Your domain name will depend on your purpose and the brand you want to project on your website, the earlier you get your domain name registered the better, once a name is registered it becomes unavailable for other people to use. In such a case, you will be looking for a different variation of the name you have chosen or an entirely different name. A domain name can have different extensions, if a name you want is not available in a particular extension, it might be available in a different extension. But you need to think carefully about using a domain name that is being used on a different extension to avoid confusion for your users. You can check your domain name availability here.

Web hosting service provider

Your web hosting service provider is the company that gives you server space to publish your website on the Internet. The web hosting service provider provides the technologies and services needed for your website to be hosted and accessible on the Internet. There is a plethora of hosting service providers to choose from and Webhostville Services is one, with servers located in the UK for safe, fast, secure and reliable hosting.

Web hosting package

Once you have identified your hosting service provider, you will need to select your hosting package depending on your needs. The hosting package provides you with your choice of hosting service including, the type of server, the size of disk space, bandwidth and many more complementary features required for your website to be hosted and accessible online. Webhostville Services do have a number of hosting packages to suit your needs, you can check it out here in more details.

CMS – Content management system

CMS is short for content management system. These days, you do not have to start creating your website from scratch with codes. You only have to choose from the number of CMS available to take the task out of starting your website. The most popular content management system on the Internet is WordPress with 33.8% usage and 60.6% market share. Other are Joomla, Drupal, plone, magento and many more. WordPress is as much a CMS as it is a blogging platform, which gives you a website and a blog all in one, depending on your needs. You can learn more about CMS here

With CMS, your website development time is shorter than having to code from scratch, it is a lot cheaper and if you can do it for yourself, it is free. In cases where CMS does not work for your needs, which is very rare these days, then your requirements here will be the codings in your chosen language, primarily HTML, CSS and some Javascript. Depending on the purpose of your website, you might need other coding language(s) in addition. At Webhostville Services, we provide wordpress service and you can let us know your needs by making a request here.

SSL – Secure Sockets Layer

SSL is short for Secure Sockets Layer. This is the technology that secures your browser connection to the server you are connecting to on the Internet to view a website. The SSL ensures that all the data transmitted within this connection is protected from interference from a third party such as hackers looking to hijack your data or corrupt it for malicious purpose. Previously, SSL was only required for websites collecting credit card details and personal data. However, due to increase in security incidents and data breaches on the Internet, websites are now required to have SSL to ensure security of data and integrity of the website.

For google to also index your website for proper ranking on the search engine, you will need SSL for your website. Without SSL on your website, you risk your website being flagged as “Not Secure”, which will in turn scare people away from using or transacting with your website. Secure websites will usually have a green bar with a padlock to show that it is secure and the url starts with “https://”, where the “s” indicates secure. You can purchase your SSL Certificate from Webhostville Services. Alternatively, there are free SSL certificate you can use on your website, depending on your web hosting provider support. Check out Let’s Encrypt and you can read more about SSL.

Your contents

Your contents makes your website. Whatever it is you want to share with the world on your website makes up your contents. Your contents will usually include, text, graphics and images, videos and audio, all depending on the message you want to put out there and your purpose.

A Developer

For your website to come alive and accessible on the Internet with all of the above requirements, if you have not got the skills to do it yourself, then you will need a skilled person to do it for you. In this case, your additional requirement is a website developer who can skilfully utilise all of the above requirements to create and deliver your website.

There you go, all you need to get your website up and running in no time.

Don’t forget to check out the previous post on setting up your professional e-mails from your domain name and don’t hesitate to contact us on info@webhostvile.com for all of your enquiries on getting your website up and running in no time. You can also send us your enquiry from this link.