How to Decide on Building Your Website or Having It Built for You

In making your decision, you also need a "blueprint" for your website. This is the infrastructure of your website. The blueprint is a diagram of all the parts of your website, and how each page is linked to each other and to the site map.

If you have not all ready decided what your website will be used for, now is the time to make your final decision. Will it be for business (either online only or both on and off line?) or personal use?

You should have decided on the domain name for your website and if you can afford to do so, I recommend purchasing yourdomain.com, yourdomain.net, yourdomain.org and yourdomain.biz.

This will enable you to have as much control as possible of yourdomain and prevent other people from using a variant of yourdomain.com that you have not purchased and registered. It is extremely important that you register your domain for as many years as possible, so the search engines take your website seriously, when they find it. (Much more about that another time). But for now, if you can register your domains for 5 years or more do so. Most hosting and domain registration companies will let you register your domain for a maximum of 10 years. Another reason to do this now, is to lock in the price for the registration for as long as you can.

Remember that many hosting companies will allow you to register a domain name as part of the purchase price for your hosting package.

By now you should have checked out some of the major web hosting companies and compared the "packages" and tools they offer to see what best meets your needs. This will enable you to decide if the hosting company has everything you need, or will you need to purchase anything else to build your website.

As I said in an earlier post, I use several different hosting companies for my websites. But I recommend for each "group" of your domains, ( ie yourdomain.com, .net, etc) you use one hosting company. This will prevent things from becoming overally complicated.

I highly recommend the hosting service 1and1.com. They have a comprehensive choice of "packages" to meet all your needs, whether you need a very basic website or you need something very intricate and detailed or anything in between. They also have a large choice of downloadable items to assist you in building your website.

But, now let's discuss those of you who have hardily any money or no money at all. There are several free hosting services, but you will have to tolerate their advertisements on your website, which may be for websites that are in direct competition with you. But even if you have to go that route, you will at least have your website up and running. But, you will still have to purchase your own domain, if you want to control it's destiny. Even if you can only afford to register your own domain for one year, it is the smart thing to do.

In my next post, I will discuss more about the necessary "infrastructure" of your website. There is a lot of things that you need to learn about "infrastruture", but do not be overwhelmed, it will all come together for you.