Building your own website can be a pain when you don’t know how. Our first instinct is to turn to friends, family members, co-workers, and even freelancers to get the job done. The problem with this is that they are often unreliable, and if they do actually finish the job it’s usually not how we imagined it. The old saying “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” could not be more true when it comes to building a website.

The truth is, these days you don’t have to be a techie to build a nice professional looking website. The only thing you need to build a website is hosting and a domain name, that’s it. After you have hosting and a domain name you can install many different open source software programs that will allow you to build websites in just a couple of clicks. There is actually no reason to ever purchase expensive website builders for any reason. A shared hosting account will cost you about $80.00 per year. Depending on the hosting provider you choose you will typically get a free domain with your shared hosting account.

Many of the shared hosting providers available today offer many one click installation programs that will allow you to install great content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and drupal just to name a few. However, you don’t have to stop there. They offer the ability to install forum software, e-commerce software, classified ad software, and much more. Once you have your hosting and domain name the possibilities really are endless. Don’t get sucked into these high priced website builders that offer very limited functionality.

Out of all the software you can install through your hosting provider’s control panel to build a website, the most effective one I can find is actually a blogging platform. This blogging platform is also a content management system as well. The name of it is WordPress, and it is becoming incredibly popular. It’s actually a good thing that it is so popular. This means there are many great website templates to download, great support forums, and other great software called plug-ins that you can install to add even more functionality.

More great benefits about WordPress is that once you install it and pick out a template you are pretty much done with design and just need to add your content from there. You can literally have a website up and running in under 10 minutes from the time of purchasing your hosting. Unlike many other blogging platforms and content management systems WordPress was built with search engine optimization in mind. This is important so that your website will actually be found in the search engines as there is no use in having a website if no one can even find it. I guess what finally pushed me over the edge to give WordPress a try is that one of the engineers at Google actually kept ranting and raving about how great WordPress was and how it was already search engine optimized. After installing WordPress and playing around with it for a while I was in love and I think you will love it too, especially since it’s 100% free. With WordPress, building a website really is easy.

Author Bio: For more on how to make a website visit us at http://www.ToMakeAWebsite.org/ and watch our free video tutorials that show you the step by step process of building a website.

Category: Internet
Keywords: building your own website, build a website, make a website, create a website,