By using this short article as a reference we will have you creating your own website in a matter of hours.

The first thing you will need is a website. There are many options for getting a website, some expensive and some are even free. Depending on whether you are selling a product, service or providing information will determine which option you should choose. Personally, I recommend that if you intend on making any profit from your website that you hire a web design company or (often far cheaper) a web design freelancer. If you just want to share some information online then you will be fine doing design yourself.

If you are on a tight budget, then you may wish to use do-it-yourself methods described below instead of hiring a web design company. However, once you do make any profit you should invest money into a professionally created web site design.

Methods for creating a website

If you are unfamiliar with HTML, you will have to use either an online website creator or what is called a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. The former option is available with almost all online hosting companies so I won't go too much into detail on them. However, I do recommend SiteStudio as one of best in this category. SiteStudio is available through nearly every web hosting company that uses H-Sphere. H-Sphere is a full featured web hosting control panel (I will go further in detail in choosing a web hosting company section).

The later option will give you a lot more flexibility; however it will cost some money. The flexibility that you will get will far outweigh cost in some of software packages listed below. Some of largest benefits include ability to easily modify your website, have a unique web-site tailored to your design requirements, you created it!, and if you do a good job there really isn't a need for hiring a web designer at a later date to redo your website.

Here are some of most popular WYSIWYG editors:

- Macromedia Dreamweaver MX - Adobe GoLive CS - Microsoft Frontpage

I recommend that you avoid Microsoft Frontpage, while it is easy to use and fairly popular, it isn't standards compliant. If you are going to learn how to create a website you should learn how to do it right.

Choosing a domain name

One of hardest things you will have to decide, yet almost more important than any of others is choosing a domain name. A domain name is what people will type in address bar of their browser to get to your website. For example, google.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com, and ebay.com are all domain names. If you will be selling a product, service or if site is business related try to stick to a .com or .net top level domain (tld) extension.

When choosing a hosting company avoid choosing a company that offers free domain registration with hosting (or do not accept free domain registration) because what they often don't tell you is that you can't transfer domain to another hosting company or even that next years fee due will be a hefty one.

Domains are typically renewed yearly and pricing ranges from around $8.00 to $35.00 each year. The cheaper domain services typically don't offer as many features as more expensive ones.

I recommend following companies for domain registration:

- Register.com - Expensive, but a well featured control panel. - GoDaddy.com - Cheap, yet full featured. - Enom.com - Also a cheaper alternative.

I recommend that you avoid Network Solutions, while they are large and have a big budget they are often criticized for doing shady things.

Choosing a web hosting company

Now days hosting has become a commodity item. There are literally tens of thousands of hosting companies, most offering exactly same features and most of them perfectly fine for your new website.

When choosing a hosting company you should try to compare features, not necessarily price. The end result is to have a website online with your product, service or information for everyone to see right? Often cheaper hosting companies lack redundancy required to ensure that your website is available 24/7. If this is a business venture you do not want to miss any potential customer due to dreaded 404 error page. However, if you are just going to be providing information you could choose a cheaper host as you don't intend on making a profit.

Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting Open Source Definition for good of community, specifically through OSI Certified Open Source Software certification mark and program . You can read about successful software products that have these properties, and about our certification mark and program, which allow you to be confident that software really is "Open Source." We also make copies of approved open source licenses here.

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify source code for a piece of software, software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs.

These are some of famous opensource scripts;