Before a Website

There are several things to take into consideration when you want to have a website.
1: What is the site going to be about?
Think about why you want a site and what it is going to be about. There are many categories of site from personal to business.
It is very important to know this before beginning because this could affect how you host the site, what the name of the site is, if you will need help building the site, and if you will need to spend money for other things such as an SSL to encrypt information or SEO to promote the site.

2: What do you want your site to be called?
A domain name needs to be chosen for the website. A domain name is a unique name on the public internet. No 2 domain names can be the same.
A domain name should be easy to remember, easy to spell, have something to do with what is being offered on your site.

Most people remember .com domain names the best, simply because everyone familiar with the internet knows .com, but there are a number of other TLDs.
TLD stands for Top Level Domain and refers to the portion of the domain name after the . such as .com, .net, .org. Having a .com is a definite advantage, but perhaps you have a sight about a television show- you might consider .tv even. See a full list of TLDs

A domain name should be easy to remember and easy to type. Consider common spellings when possible and a domain name that is short in length.
Do people visiting your site really want to have type out th1s-is-a-fantas1k-long-website-name.com whenever they want to view the site? For every extra letter and every "uniquely" spelled word in your domain name is the chance for a typo to take place.
Some people will get frustrated, some people won't realize there has been a mistype and assume your site is just down, some people may never get to the site at all because they just didn't know the correct spelling of the domain name.
The point is that a domain name can affect the amount of traffic coming into a website. Remember the old K.I.S.S. Phrase Keep It Simple Stupid. It still holds true for websites and what you name it.

A personal website can really be anything, but if you are building a site you want to draw traffic, the domain name should reflect what the site is about. How many people would have visited picked this site from the search engine to learn about the internet if it had been called chickenarmy.com. Not quite as many people because howtointernet.net sounds like it would provide better information about the topic than chickenarmy.com. Some places offer domain name suggestions if you need help picking one out.
The system through NameBoy generates suggestions based on words you are looking to have in your domain name.

Have a domain name in mind? Well now you need to check to see if that domain name is already in use by someone. Just because a site does not come up when you type it into a web browser does not mean that the domain name is available.
The best way to determine if a domain name is available is by checking a whois look up. A whois looks up the public record for a domain name through the various registrars. Increasingly whois lookups have been expanding the scope of where they check and what TLDs they can provide information for. See a list of several whois lookups.

3: What type of hosting do you need for your site?
Many people have a pretty good idea of what they want their site to be able to to do. Some people just want a simple website, some people need a database, others want to sell things, some just want an FTP server for exchange of large files and programs.
Often people make a bad mistake and simply purchase webhosting from one of those hundreds of webhosting companies that advertise all over the internet that they only charge $5 or $6 a month for hosting. Do not make that mistake. First find out what types of hosting companies there are.

Choosing the wrong type of hosting plan can kill a site before it has even gotten published to the internet. See a list of Hosting Types Here. Once you have chosen the right hosting type for your site, then make sure the hosting company you choose will support the types of things you want on the site itself. If for example you want a phpBB bulletin board or a PHP forum for visitors to participate in, then make sure the webhosting company you go with supports PHP. If you want to use an ASP program- you must get a windows hosting plan. Think about these BEFORE purchasing hosting