The process of building a website can be as simple or as complicated as you like, and the time it takes to do so can range from a few hours to eternity. If you’re a beginner, and don’t have much scripting and programming experience (or none at all), then you should set yourself reasonable goals and start with something that is a bit more simple.
Learn To Take Shortcuts
Taking a shortcut is not cheating, and as a beginner you simply can’t afford the time and energy of figuring everything out for yourself all at once. It’s a learning process, and that process takes time. So, instead of coding your own content management system, or teaching yourself HTML and CSS for hundreds of hours, take a shortcut and use a platform such as WordPress.
This content management system is very popular, free, and fairly simple to get started on. One of the other major benefits of WordPress is the huge amount of free resources, plugins, and tutorials available online that will guide you through the step by step process of whatever you are trying to accomplish.
Hosting and Domain Names Are Cheap – Avoid Free Stuff
You need somewhere to put your website where it will hopefully develop and grow, but if you choose the wrong host you will be slowing down your progress. There are many other guides and forums where you can ask about good hosting companies, but the main point to remember is that you should avoid free hosting. It will only cost you around $5 – $10 per month for a good setup at a reputable hosting provider.
The price for a domain name such as YourWebsite.com will be around $10 per year – maybe a little more or a little less, depending on which registrar you use. This is a tiny price to pay considering all of the benefits you will have. Using your own domain name looks a lot cleaner and is easier to remember for a start, and it also makes your website look more professional.
Be Realistic About Your Plans
So you’ve had this great idea to make a website that lists every movie ever made, and allows users to vote on them and give reviews.. but that has already been done, and is extremely popular. Is it realistic to think that your new website can compete with something like IMDb? Probably not, so you either need to come up with a new plan, or give your website a unique feature/gimmick to set it apart from others.
There are millions of websites already online though which means there is a very high chance that whatever idea you come up with will be overlapping with some of them. This is unavoidable, so your best bet is again to try to be unique and give your own personal touch to the website you are making.
Don’t worry too much if the first website you build doesn’t live up to your dreams and expectations; everyone has to start somewhere, and there is no reason why you can’t have more than one website or just continue to work on your first one. You will most likely find that during your first run at making a site you learn a whole lot of new skills and tricks that you can use on later projects.