Creating your own website can be useful for a number of purposes. Whether it's to share your expertise on a particular topic, start an online business, foster a community, or just maintain an online journal of your activities, having a website will allow you to make your content accessible from any connected computer. It can also theoretically allow you to have a larger audience for your ideas than you would ever have otherwise. If you have useful ideas or observations to share, you may be able to share them with as many as a few dozen people throughout the day, if you are lucky. With a website, you can share them with hundreds or even thousands.
Possibly the easiest way to create your own website is to use Google Page Creator. This service, still in beta, provides intuitive interfaces for adding text, images, links, and other bits of content to a webpage hosted by Google. The web address of your page will be yourgoogleusername.googlepages.com.
Google Page Creator is a WYSIWIG web design platform, which means "What You See is What You Get" - what you create in the design interface is what your visitors will see. Google Page Creator automatically saves your website pages as you type them, so nothing of value can be lost. The whole system is so extremely simple that even those without basic computer literacy skills can probably use it.
If you want more options and functionality on your website, as well as your own dedicated web address, you'll need to create pages in HTML, register a web domain, and get a hosting server to upload your pages to. Web domains can be registered at any number of registrars - Godaddy.com is a popular one. Google "hosting" or "cheap hosting" to find many thousands of available hosting companies. As a general rule of thumb, if you're paying more than about 10 US dollars (USD) per month for hosting for a low-traffic website, you're paying way too much. Many companies offer space for 5 USD a month.
To create HTML, you can write it from scratch in notepad, or use a WYSIWIG program like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage. HTML is not a programming language per se, and as such is much easier to use than true programming languages. You can learn basic HTML in less than an hour and start using it to create your very own web pages.
After you create your pages, they must be uploaded to your server. You will receive a username and password from your host once you register with them. You can use these in an application called an FTP program to connect your computer with the server, then send your completed pages from computer to server. Once uploaded, your website will be visible on the World Wide Web for all to enjoy. Within a few days, pages with inbound links will be indexed by Google and begin to appear in search results.
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