There are a few ways to get your own website, so I decided to put together a quick How to: your own website.
The simplest way is to go somewhere online like Blogger.com or WordPress.com and you can set up a working blog/website with the ability to have most everything, but typically you lose some control since you don’t officially own the website. Instead you borrow space on their website.
Another way to set up an easy website is by going to a hosting site such as GoDaddy or something, and they usually cost about $5-20 per month and allow you a little more freedom with your site, but it can also be annoying since you can only use their bland website themes and can’t control too much of the layout and usage of your site. They also like to put ads on the website so everyone in the world knows that it is built by the hosting company, so it doesn’t look completely professional.
Another option is a more professional, more expensive route of a website group that charge an extreme amount of money, but they update their themes more often and give you much more freedom in the look and feel of your website. But they still like to let your visitors know that you have used their company and can look a bit less professional with some of those companies. One of these companies is SlabMedia.com who are like this.
The most time consuming and most expensive option is to have someone build your website from the ground up by coding and designing the website through something like Dreamweaver or another expensive web designing software. These take weeks to build and must be done by professional web designers and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. But you do get a completely unique website with the most functionability. But if you want to add something like a blog or update on a regular basis, you usually must go through the web designers to add each piece, and depending on the quality of the company, this also can take a long time.
The best option of how to your own website is to have someone put together the pieces of the website and give to you in a way that is simple to use and simple to add through WordPress software that goes on your own website that you own. This way you can have complete control over your content and WordPress has the most versatile software to change the look and feel and functionablity of every aspect of your site. If you want, you can pay to have someone design the website, but there are millions of free themes that can fit whatever you are looking for.
And if you don’t know anything about web setup or computer language or coding, you can have someone set up the pieces for you and give them to you as a finished product so you can make any changes and updates just like you would to your Facebook or LinkedIn page. All the technical parts have been taken care of and if you want to do more, you can either do it yourself, or have that company do something extra while they are setting it up for a low additional charge.
The pros to this is that WordPress is free software, and the setup only takes a few minutes, so it only costs a couple hundred dollars for the technical knowledge and the time that you are paying for and you can get the site up in only a few days at most. This allows the website developers to offer a low price and a great product that is completely unique and specialized to your needs.
So whatever your needs, there are many ways to get exactly what you want for your company or portfolio website. This How To: Your Own Website is designed to educate and help small businesses know their options to build your own websites.
