Are you wondering how this webpage has been designed?  You must be thinking it is really a complicated task to create a website. But actually it is not too much difficult if you plan properly before developing a website.

Website is just like a book having numbers of pages called webpage. Each page is identified by its unique address (URL). The basic computer language used to develop a webpage is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). There are lots of editors available that can generate HTML codes with just mouse click .I will suggest you to write the code by yourself because it’s really fun to learn HTML!

I am going to demonstrate how to build a simple website containing information about you. The website development task can be classified into 5 stages.

1) Defining the objective of the site
2) Determining the layout of the page
3) Collecting the required files and software
4) Coding and testing
5) Hosting the website

1) Defining the objective of the site

It’s the most important part of website development because without proper planning the website development task may remain uncompleted. A proper planning helps to determine the content of the site and its layout.
Our aim is to design a personal website. It contains information about your education, hobbies, professional life, achievements, likes and dislikes, contact number, family members, personal photos and so on. The visitors can be your family members, friends, customers or someone unknown. So the content must be in simple and plain English.

2) Determining the layout of the page

First you take a piece of paper and draw the prototype of the webpage using pen or pencil. Specify the position of logo, heading, photograph and paragraphs in the page; also mention the color of the text. Please see the following layout of the webpage.

You can download free webpage templates and modify them to suit your needs very easily. Otherwise you can use editors (Dreamweaver, Frontpage) to design the layout. Here I am not using either any templates or editors, to demonstrate the design task easily.

The layout of your site should be considered from the visitor’s point of view. Always divide the whole content into small chunk of information and represent each with separate headings. This helps the visitor to scan the whole page very quickly and easily.

3) Collecting the required files and software

Before you start coding of a webpage, you should have access to all the required software, photos, any other files that you want to include. It makes the webpage design easier.

Since this is a very simple website having little information. We need an editor (Notepad /WordPad), web browser (Internet Explorer/ Mozilla Firefox) and the required photos.

4) Coding and testing

It is a very important part of webpage design. If you know little bit of html then it will be easier for you to understand the coding and you can experiment with these sample codes. The sample code is availble at my site http://www.iamjyoti.50webs.com/codes/index.txt . Otherwise, just copy the codes and follow the instructions to create this website.

This website contains only a single webpage called index.html. Later you can add more number of pages as per your requirement. You just copy the following code to the Notepad; add your own personal information in the required fields (i.e. [Heading...], [Title of the webpage...] etc.) and remove the brackets. Save the file as “index.html” in a new folder called “mysite”.

Select the pictures for logo and photo section, transfer those pictures to mysite folder. Then put those file names in the required fields of index.html with their extension.

Now your webpage is ready for use. Right click on index.html and open with the available browser software. This is a view of the webpage that I have created with my personal information. You can see the full page at http://www.iamjyoti.50webs.com

5) Hosting the website

Finally you are going to make your presence on World Wide Web. Currently the website is on your computer hard disk and only you can access that site. To make this site globally visible you have to upload it to a web server. You need a unique domain name, web space and some other facilities for hosting a site.

There are lots of web hosting companies that make this task easier. You have to pay them according to the facilities that you need. You can also host the site absolutely free, but this provides limited web space.  Some companies like bravehost.com, 2ip.com, freewebs.com and 50webs.com provides free hosting facility.

You can join any of those sites in free of cost Choose a domain name for your site, upload your webpage with the pictures to their server. Congrats! Finally your site is published on World Wide Web.

If you create your website after reading this article then kindly post your website URL in the comments. Thank you.

Note - I am neither advertising my site nor 50webs.com. I have just shown how to create and host a website easily. Since there is no facility here to display html codes. So I have provided an external link for the codes.