How to make website easily to make money or just for fun

How to make website easily to make money. The good news is that it is easy. The bad news is that it is only a little part of what needs to be done before and after you put up your own web pages. If you put up a stall selling water from the fountain of youth in the middle of the desert, because that's where the fountain is, you won't get many customers walking by! You must go where the customers are.

That's why you shouldn't jump in to making your own website without the important preliminaries.

How to Create a Website - Your Progress So Far

When I first wondered "How do I make my own website?" I only knew how to design a page. A web site is a collection of web pages. So far you should have worked through the following:

Researched and Planned your Website

Chosen your how-to-build-a-website Software, or decided to work without any

Learned all the html that you intend to learn

Learned enough about php and css to get by (borrow books from public library)

Bought a domain name

Signed up with a web host

Designed your Web Templates

Planned the layout of your directories

How do you Make Your Own Website

Following the directory layout in the last step, create the same directory (folder) layout on your own computer, with empty directories until you put something in them.

Creating a directory

This is the same whether the directory is on your computer, or on your host's computer. First you have to navigate to the folder where you want to create a new folder, then create it. If you have Windows on your computer, you use Alt+F (hold down the Alt key and tap the F key) to call up the file menu. It will probably have the word new highlighted, so press enter. It will now have the word folder highlighted, so press enter again, then type in the name for your new folder.

In FTP you right click anywhere in the parent folder, then click in the drop-down menu to create a new directory.

How to Build a Website Systematically

The reason for creating the same folder structure on your own computer as you will have on your website is that your memory isn't perfect. So if you put everything in one directory on your own computer, you'll never be able to find a file again when you want to change a web page.

Landing Pages

Now, each directory will need a landing page (home page) which will be called index.php if you follow my advice. This is probably the most important page in the directory, because without it your visitors and the Search Engines won't know how to find anything in the directory. That's why it's called an index page.

Each landing page should have a title that includes the main keyword for that directory, and the first and last sentence in the article should include that same keyword. That is to please the search engines.

Create an index.html file for each directory (except special directories like ones with images in them). You will change this to index.php when you transfer it to your host, but unless you have a php server installed on your computer, you will be unable to view the file in your browser if you call it php.

Now write your other pages, filling them into the appropriate folders on your computer.

Design Your Website Structure

Root Directory

Home page - index to your first-level sub-directories. See my own beginners make ownwebsite root home page for one way of doing it - the important things are to whet visitors appetites and point them in the right direction.

Sitemap: Generate once site is up, but link to /sitemap.html on every page, even before it exists. Notify Google, Yahoo, and MSN of your XML version of the sitemap. Free sitemap generator at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Contact: Your contact details. Disguise your email (to avoid spam robots) with the free tool at http://www.fingerlakesbmw.org/main/flobfuscate.php

FAQ: Optional. Find questions you can answer on forums.

Membership: Not needed for beginners. This is where you find people who need your newsletter.

Terms of Use: Legal stuff that Google likes. Copy mine and change the details to your own. I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't be using these legal forms if I didn't trust them. Show them to a lawyer to make sure.

Disclaimer: Legal stuff that could save you an expensive court case. Copy mine and change the details

robots.txt: Tells search engines which pages not to list, and which nasty robots are not welcome

favicon.ico: Appears when people bookmark your pages. (Look in your bookmarks and see the icons beside most entries). Join my free membership to see a video showing how I create a favicon. Better still, download the videos so you can keep going back to them when you forget something.

.htaccess: Probably not needed for beginners, but you will want it sooner or later. If your host allows it, you can tell it to treat html pages as php pages, you can change the error page contents, and you can redirect visitors when you change the URL, and that's just a start.

Links to sitemap, contact, FAQ, Membership, Privacy, TOU, disclaimer (don't include a no-follow)

Subfolder Contents

Home page for each sub-directory

Articles - a good starting point is five, but the more there are on different keywords the more often search engines will find you.

Link to root home directory, with keyword rich targets. That means if your link says <a href="" >target</a> then you should replace the word target with keywords closely related to your theme. Don't include a no-follow.

Links to sitemap, contact, FAQ, Membership, Privacy, TOU, disclaimer. Do include a no-follow. Like this: <a href="" rel="nofollow" >target</a> because you don't want the search engines to think your site is about disclaimers for instance!

Links to sub-sub directories for that directory. You can also link to other sub-directories, but link to the home page, not to an individual article if you don't use a nofollow. This is so search engines won't get confused in a maze.

You now know how to build your own website on your computer.

It is time to learn how to create your own website on your host's computer, known as a server.

Have you made no mistakes at all? If so you are a lot better at this than I am! So the first thing I always to is to create a sub-domain called "test". The URL for the sub-domain will be http://test . yourdomain

The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) which I'll tell you about soon, will have a path something like home/public_html/test and the stuff for your main domain will be in home/public_html directory.

To create your sub-domain go to http://yourdomain/cpanel (I hope you did follow my advice and choose a host that offers cpanel) then click on the subdomains icon. Servers vary so you will have to read what their form says, but just put the word "test" into the box where you think it should go, and create your subdomain. The computer will then tell you that it has created a sub-domain called whatever, and if it is wrong, you delete the sub-domain and try again. You should end up with one called test . yourdomain

OK, you can logoff from cPanel now and start to create your site using FTP. If you have installed Filezilla, as I recommended in the software section, power it up now. Any FTP software will do, but they each have their own ways of doing things and I'll describe the Filezilla way.

Click the "Open the site manager" icon (top left below the file menu). When you hover your mouse over an icon you will see what the icon does.

Click the new site button and type in the name you choose for your new site. Myself, I just use my domain name, but you can call it anything you like.

Now fill in the host field. Surprisingly, this isn't the name of your host. I type in the name of my domain such as beginnersmakeownwebsite.com

Change the logon type to normal - this is important, because anonymous login would mean that anybody could log in and change your site. Normal means that visitors will be asked for a password.

When you made your contract with your host, they would have given you a username. They may even have given you a password, in which case you should log in to cPanel and change the password to something you won't forget, but containing capital and small letters and numbers for greatest security. Criminals (hackers) have robots that try every word in the dictionary as a password, so don't use a word in the dictionary. If you know two languages combine a slang word from English with a word from the other language and jam a number in there somewhere.

Type in your username and password in the FTP form (I usually type my password into the username field, then check that it is right, then highlight and cut (Ctrl+X) and paste (Ctrl+V) it into my password field, then type in my username. That makes sure that I get the password right.

Click OK to save the details. Then open the site manager again and double-click the site that you have just set up. You should be logged in to your site if you have done everything right. In the top-right window labeled Remote site it will show / as where you are. / means your home directory.

In the bottom right panel labeled filename you will see a list of directories. None of these are visible to your visitors except public_html and www which are just two names for the same directory.

Double-click on public_html to open up your main domain directory. You should see that it contains a directory called "test" that you created in cPanel when you made your subdomain.

Double-click on the test directory to get into it. Later on, when you want no navigate up the line again you can either double-click on the .. directory listing, or find the directory that you want in the listing in the top-right window and choose that.

The Easy Part of How to Build a Web Page

In the right windows you should now be located inside your test directory. Now in the left windows, navigate to your test directory.

Highlight everything in the test directory (including sub-directories) and drag everything over to the right. I think you could also click the Transfer menu, but I just drag everything over.

Now you can watch in the top and bottom windows as your computer transfers everything across.

When it is finished you should disconnect from your server by clicking the red X icon, then close Filezilla. Your URL will be http://test . yourdomain

Testing

Try to browse your site. You should get something appearing, but it may not be what you intended. So you make corrections, and FTP them to your site, make more corrections and so on...

Use Xenu (see my website software section) to find all the broken links - i.e. links where you have made a mistake of some kind. Correct them.

When you can find no more mistakes, delete (highlight everything then right click and choose delete from the drop-down menu) all the contents of your test directory at your web server but leave the empty directory there for future use.

Now go back to Filezilla and transfer all your web pages from the test directory on your computer into your public_html directory at your host. Now your URL will be http://yourdomain/

This is how to make website, but note that if you used absolute addressing for internal files, you may have to change them when you transfer out of the test subdomain. Relative links should still work. Just run Xenu again to make sure.