Web Development - How To Build a Website

It is nowadays almost unthinkable to run a company without a well organised website. With the correct knowledge, non-commercial organisations and even individuals can promote themselves on the web. And everyone does, because what’s more beautiful than having the whole world as potential customer and public? Here you can find more information on how to build a website. Creating own websites may require lots of knowledge, but it doesn’t need to be difficult!

Let’s discuss the most obvious solution first, because then you don’t have to read the rest of this article. Making your own website may be a hopeless endeavour for you, so you’d like to let someone else make it for you. You must therefore do what one normally does with a broken water pipe or car: outsourcing the problem. Hiring web developers is the most simple solution and at the same time almost always guaranteed to be a good solution. You don’t have to make your own website: watch it being made! I happen to use the web development services of a professional company called Webtoria, and it works out pretty well for me. Making use of professional web development services can save you lots of headaches. But anyway, this isn’t the focus of this article. If you’re rather interested in how to build your own website, read further. Get ready for some interesting stuff!

Building own websites really is much easier than you would think. As it happens, there are nowadays complete frameworks for websites available on the internet. These are called content management systems, or CMS in short. This software not only is free, but also maintained by an enormous crowd of voluntary programmers. Revised versions with improvements and new functionalities are regularly released, and each of these can be conveniently downloaded from their websites. I have listed the best and most popular content management systems below.

• WordPress
  WordPress was initially developed as a blogging system, but has evolved into one of the most widely used and supported content management systems in the world. Easily set up, user-friendly, choice from as much as thousands of plugins and themes, and a very large community base. Moreover, WordPress offers for each of your WordPress sites a free subdomain. It’s a very suitable system for beginners and end-users alike, although developers can make very powerful websites out of it as well.
• Joomla
  Joomla offers both developers and end-users many possibilities to make their own websites. The system has been very well developed for the past few years and has a very large community which can help you on your way. An important characteristic of Joomla is that it offers space for extraordinarily beautiful website designs. For this reason, it isn’t strange that most web stylists choose this system to express their creativity.
• Drupal
  Drupal is more suited for the advanced user. This system offers enormous flexibility for developers and programmers, and is therefore also the most suitable for making very specific adaptations and customizations to your website. The user-friendliness for the end-user is somewhat diminished, but certainly not bad. Just like the other two systems, Drupal also has a vast community basis.

Instead of using pre-prepared systems, you can ofcourse also make your own website. And by this I mean that you can really absorb the underlying techniques to literally build it yourself. To develop a website successfully, you must have some knowledge about how a website works. The following three logical concepts constitute a website.

• Frontend
  This is the layout of your website and what you see on your display. It exists of special code called markup language. Nowadays HTML is the only markup language that’s used for websites. This language is characterised by special mark-up tags. For example, the code <button>Click me!</button> will display a button with the text “Click me!”. The frontend can also be made more interactive by applying a special scripting language called JavaScript.
• The database
  In your database you can store all data related to your website. You can store, for example, the data of all user accounts of your website. Every time a visitor wants to log in, a check is made to find out whether a user is really registered in your database and whether he or she has entered the correct password. The most popular od free databases is undoubtedly MySQL. The database is controlled by sending special commands called queries. With queries, data can be both retrieved from and stored into the database. If you have no data to store, then it is ofcourse better to not use a database. Websites with fixed text, or with text that almost never changes, are possibly better off just having a frontend.
• The backend
  The backend logically resides between the frontend and the database. The real brain-racking work happens here. The backend can, for example, consist of code that fetches certain data from your database and then subsequently processes them into the frontend. This way your website will be able to have dynamic content. The contents of your website can constantly change as long as the data stored in your database changes. There are nowadays many scripting languages available, but PHP appears to be the preference at this moment because of low costs and a very favourable learning curve. If you don’t have a database, the backend can still be used to carry out more complicated operations which are not possible for the frontend. Examples range from checking input to sending e-mails.

If you’re interested in learning all these, I suggest you make your start at W3Schools, which is an excellent and to the point learning center for HTML, PHP, MySQL and various other web development techniques.

A very simple way to make your own website is using online services with which you can build your website for free and then host it at the same place for free as well. Your website is therefore instantly online, the only thing you have to do is register yourself. You can log in to their CMS and manage your website. Below follow a number of examples.

• Google Sites
  Google sites is a very extensive and free online website service. You log in with your google account, register yourself for Google Sites and you can already start building your website without wasting any time. You can choose from an empty template or predefined templates aimed at for example football teams, restaurants etc. A wide range of gadgets is available to make you website more interactive and fun. In short, you can put together all types of websites with just a couple of simple clicks.
• Blogger
  Blogger is another Google service and is meant to give you your own free blog and manage it. It is completely specialised in making and publishing blogs. Blog articles, comments, trackbacks and pagination are functions of Blogger that make up your blog, but adding extensions to this is child’s play thanks to their wide supply of gadgets.
• WordPress
  WordPress offers free online blogs as well, just like Blogger, but has better organisational possibilities. You have for example tags and categories in which you can group and organise your articles. WordPress has everything Blogger has, including a broad choice of plugins.