How to Create Your Website in 24 Hours

So you want to create a website, huh?

Building, designing, and creating your own website is a simple task if you know which tools to use. To keep this article short and sweet, I will walk you through the steps so you may create a website in 1 day or less.

Find Your Passion and Create a Website Around It

Rule #1: Create a website around a topic you care about.

It’s the fast track to success. You will enjoy the designing, building, maintaining, writing, and interacting process so much more because your domain encompasses a topic you are passionate about.

I’ve learned that creating websites intended solely for monetary reasons are doomed for failure. Websites take years to build, grow, and monetize. I compare building a website to planting a tree. The more you water a tree (invest in your website), the stronger and faster it will grow.

Try to avoid the “get rich quick on the internet” trap. You will save yourself lots of time and money. If you must create a website for profit, start a legal business so you can pay someone else to do the heavy lifting.

Register a Premium Domain Name

Domain names are the “real estate” of the internet. eBay.com, Google.com, and Facebook.com are just a few of the internet’s most successful web domains, and you have to purchase a quality domain to host your website on. While some websites offer domains hosted on their servers for free, owning your own domain name looks more professional and builds trust quicker.

Domain names at godaddy cost between $1 to $9, depending on whether your domain ends in .com, .info, .net, etc. Strive for .com endings because premium dot com domains are in short supply and high demand. Dot coms will retain more value in the long run.

Find a Quality, Reliable Webhost

Once you register your domain name, your website requires hosting to be available live on the internet. I will assume that you don’t own a personal server (who does?), so you can find a third-party hosting company to manage your files online.

When searching for a quality webhost, I look for:

Many webmasters focus solely on cost, but I believe cost deserves lesser concern in the long run. Who cares if you pay $2 a month when your websites is offline all the time. If your website remains offline, you make nothing. Search for quality and service first, then consider cost later.

Recommend WebHost: bluehost

BlueHost hosts Tarikpierce.com, and is my favorite shared host on the internet. You receive:

Bluehost charges $6.95 per month, a highly competitive monthly rate in the online web hosting industry. As you add more domains to your hosting account, your cost per domain falls drastically. Reliable web hosting is the most important business expense for internet entrepreneurs. Any successful webmaster will second this.

Sign Up for BlueHost Webhosting

Work With a Powerful Content Management System

Once you point your nameservers to your hosting account, you can begin building your website. If you know little about designing a website, that’s perfectly fine. Forget about design, and start adding content to your site first. Content drives traffic, period. Worry about your design after you have a bit of content in place.

In the past 3 years, two powerful content management systems (CMS) came to life: Wordpress and Drupal. These CMS programs give the webmaster more control over his or her content easily and intuitively, while also using PHP to add dynamic elements to your website.

Wordpress works well with webmasters of any skill background, novice or advanced. I recommend using Wordpress when starting out because your site will be live faster.

If you’re willing to invest more time in building a complete website with forums, subdomains, community features, shops, then Drupal provides more control over those aspects. The Drupal learning curve is higher, yet yields more value in the long run.

Write Your First Article ASAP

Once you decide on a proper CMS for your website, start writing ASAP! The longer you put off writing your first article, the less interested you become in growing your website. So get off that couch and tell the world what you have to say.

When you publish your first article, people and search engines will notice. Search engines visit your site, index your article, and will come back for more. If you tell your friends your domain name, they will visit and look around. This is your chance to shine, so make a wonderful first impression.

Market Your Website!

Now that you have some content on your site, you must drive traffic to your site by telling friends, colleagues, relatives, etc to stop by and stay “Hello!” There are tons of creating ways to market your site:

There are hundreds of ways to skin the “web traffic” cat. Be creative, act intelligently, and have fun!

Final Remarks

As I said before, create a website around a topic you care about, and build relationships with trustworthy, reliable companies. Your website will grow faster and quicker that way.

Always remember design should be secondary if you have little money to invest in design. It’s more advantageous to maintain a simple web design than a distracting, colorful custom design. Your visitors desire your content and nothing else, unless you run a web design company!

Recap

  1. Find Your Passion
  2. Register a Premium Domain Name
  3. Buy Reliable Hosting
  4. Use a Powerful Content Management System
  5. Write/Upload Content ASAP
  6. Market your Website

These are the basics. More advanced topics like tracking visitors, SEO, and marketing will come later.

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Bookmark and Share Posted on July 29, 2007 | Filed Under Web Development

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Comments

5 Responses to “How to Create Your Website in 24 Hours”


  1. Juggler Says:

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:06 am

    This post is very good; a lot of newbies will certainly be guided by this.

    There’s just one thing that I don’t agree with when it comes to marketing your website, and that’s the “Pay for traffic” part. If you meant buy directory listings/run ad campaigns, then I apologize for the misunderstanding. But if you meant buy traffic from traffic sellers (10k visitors for $5 or something), then I have to disagree with you. In my opinion, buying traffic will only waste your site’s bandwidth and the traffic that you bought will not convert. There are rare cases that bought traffic are of high-quality though.

    The best sources for traffic are search engines and word-of-mouth (nothing beats promotion for your site done by others). :)

    Anyway, as I said, this post will surely aid webmasters, especially the new ones. Good luck!



  2. Tarik Says:

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    When I first started blogging, I played around with BlogExplosion, then found it utterly useless. I’m pretty sure everyone visits sites to promote their own site, which ruins the whole point of generating traffic. Traffic exchanges attract web hits, but poorly targeted ones like you said. I’m consider using Adwords to drive traffic to a few landing pages for affiliate products.

    Will write an article sharing my thoughts in the future. Thanks for stopping by!



  3. King Rocket » Blog Archive » Things you Can Teach Yourself in 24 Hrs or Less Says:

    August 23rd, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    [...] :: The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 HoursHow to Create Your Website in 24 HoursLearn Python in 10 minutes | Poromenos’ StuffLearn UNIX in 10 [...]



  4. 5 Powerful Email Marketing Tips Says:

    June 11th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

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  5. baby Says:

    June 16th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    Nice website!!


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