5 Things You Need to Know Before Building a Website

http://www.webhostreviewer.com/articles/basics-of-web-hosting/5-things-you-need-to-know-before-building-a-website/
5 Things You Need to Know Before Building a Website

Creating and maintaining can be a serious undertaking for any individual or business that is considering to improve their online presence. There are some vital things that are necessary to be known before taking on this undertaking. Whether it's the business of running a website, how to configure servers, web programming and scripting languages, software that is required, and more, it can be an overwhelming process for a lot of if there is no direction given.

.

Building a website is very much so a learning experience. A lot of acronyms are thrown around by the veterans, and so a lot of terms and programming knowledge is posted on websites. It is not necessary to know each and every bit of information, so do not attempt to do so and have an information overload. It is important to remember that there is no one click solution to building a website; it takes time, effort, and content to build a solid website, and it is a solid project that may not even be explored by anyone on the Internet. There are a lot of ways to start learning, and a lot of ways to start building websites. More technical users may want to go for a custom design and manually programming and coding the website using HTML, CSS, PHP, and other languages. Others may want to use easier solutions like site builders and Content Management Systems (CMS).

.

People who are considering to go the manual route are first and foremost going to need to know how to code HTML. It sounds much more difficult than it is. HTML is not even a real programming language, it's a scripting language and can be learned in a day. There are tags that are applied to blocks of text that can change their attributes and features, and media can be embedded in the pages with the tags, like images, audio, videos, flash players, and more. A book could be bought and read, but online tutorials may be sufficient for most, and will even allow real time editing to see how certain tags change the page.

.

CSS will be necessary to properly style websites and give them flair and designs. It does have a pretty significant learning curve, contrasting to HTML's ease of use, but it offers a lot of flexibilty and features when building sites. The actual design of the website is placed in the stylesheet, and any page on a server may access it. CSS centralizes a lot of the designs and HTML tags so that it is not necessary to place tags around each and every line of code.

.

It is possible to build websites with plain old Notepad from Windows, but having some good software like Dreamweaver or using a website builder is advantageous and can allow awareness of what changes to the CSS and HTML code will look like before uploading the files.

.

Those considering to go the easier route will want to use site builders or CMS platforms like Wordpress or Drupal to create sites. CMS platforms are commonly free of charge and offer a lot of features, easy customization, and quick setups. Anyone can create a website in minutes using this solution, while learning how to manually create a website will take much more time and effort. This may be the best option for those that are lazy, or have little time to spare.

.