Creating a Website?

As part of my back to basics series, I’m going to walk you through a quick and cheap way to create a web presence for under USD 55 a year.  I hear people all the time tell me they are going to hire a web developer to create a website for thousands of dollars, my first reaction is to cringe. 80% of the time you can get away with a website that I’m going to describe. Then if you really want to hire a graphics designer and not a web developer. You can create a website in 3 easy steps:

1. Register a name with a domain register.  The one I recommend and have been using for years is GoDaddy.com, if you want a .in address for India then head to registry.in. The domain name should cost around USD 10 a year. Update: GoDaddy can now can register .IN addresses for about USD 5/year.

2. Select a hosting provider.  I’ve been using GoDaddy.com for the past 4 years and have had no issues. But there are others such as Rackspace or 1and1. A yearly GoDaddy plan can be had for USD 45 a year.

3. Install WordPress. This is the critical step and the secret sauce. WordPress is an open source blogging package but also a content management system.  Thousands of companies use it for their corporate website not to mention the millions that use it for blogging.  As you can imagine this blog uses WordPress and has been for the past 5 years. Once you install WordPress you no longer have to deal with the technical details of a website from this point forward you use the WordPress GUI dashboard.

4. Pick a theme for WordPress.  A theme is what sets your website apart from others.  The beauty of WordPress is the community of developers that are creating tons on themes. Most are free and some can cost USD 100 which is cheap for a corporate website. Below are two places that have a ton of themes to pick from:

WordPress.org Themes Directory
Weblog Tools Collection

So who can benefit from this quick and cheap tutorial? Doctors, consultants, architects, jewelry stores, media professional, ad agencies, etc…the list goes on and on.

So there you have it, a quick and cheap web presence that should work for more then 80% of the people looking to create a website.