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There are thousands of web sites on the Internet. More and more people now have them. This could be to promote your offline business, run an online business or just have a platform to air your thoughts on your favourite topic.

If you are an internet lover then there may come a time when you decide to make your own website. The website you choose to make could be in many forms . This article is going to deal with generating your own site from just the windows text writer - notepad.

Here are some basics that we need to know about starting your own site.

Domain Names

A domain name is the first thing you will need to get a website up and running. A domain name is the address or URL that people will type into the address bar on their internet browser to access your site. This will usually start with the www - e.g www.mysite.com. Domain names have to be unique so finding one that is not too long and ideally, very catchy is going to be tough. Do a search on Google for Domain names and you will find loads of companies that supply them. You can search if the domain name is free and buy it for a small amount of money.

Domain names have lots of different extensions on the end of them. You have probably noticed the .com and .co.uk at the end of different websites. There are several different extensions you can choose from. a .com is generally more expensive as it is regonised worldwide . A .co.uk is a UK extension so would be ideal if your site was targeting a UK audience or based in the UK. Not to say that a.co.uk site cannot get a worldwide audience though - it is more the fact that people can easily recognise you as a UK site. There are many other extensions that you can only opt for however some have restrictions. a .edu is only for educational establishments and a .ltd.uk is only for limited companies - so as you can see there are restrictions.

Once you have purchased your domain name you then need to think about hosting.

Web Hosting

This is where your website will reside. A domain name alone will do nothing - a hosting package will link your domain name to your webpage files for the world to see.

There are many different types of web hosting available - some cheap, some expensive. If you are just starting out then I would suggest the cheapest will do the job quite nicely. You may find the people that you bought your domain from will also offer hosting as part of a package but I would advise shopping around as price can vary a lot. I would suggest that a years worth of hosting would cost you no more than £25 ($50 approx).

It is important to note that the attaching of your domain name to the hosting package and indeed the creation of the domain name can taker up to 48 hours to complete. So do not be alrmed if it does not immediately work.

Building your site

So now you have everything you need to build up your site. This is where you now have a lot of options available to you depending on what you want your site to be about and how you intend to manage it. For the purpose of this article we are going to assume that you just want a simple page online so when people visit your site they can look up some information about you or your company.

To allow us to do this we need to understand a bit of HTML - HTML may sound scary but it really isn't It stands for hyper text markup language. This allows you to create a very basic webpage in something like your standard notepad editor that comes with Windows.

There is an alternative to this. There are programs called WYSIWYG editors. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. These can make designing webpages very easy. There are some free WYSIWYG editors but for the purpose of this article we are going to assume that you do not have access to these programs and we will stick with HTML.