A Practical Guide For Having Your Own Website :
The aim of this article is to help you understand how you can own your website. And to provide you with practical information to begin your online journey.
In order for you to have your website you first need to have, purchase, your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) , your online address , also called the domain name or your website address . i.e. http://www.itmontreal.com is the URL of our website. Your URL is how people reach you. And thus it is very important for you to select a name that is easy for everyone to understand and recall. Your biggest challange while purchasing a domain name will be to find the a good name that is still available to purchase. (Here is an anology : If you would like to have the phone number 514.888.88.88 it has to be available for you to purchase it. ) Each domain name can consist of a combination of letters and numbers. One can not have such characters as apostrophy , space , quotation marks, etc. within the domain name . Only letters, numbers , hyphen and underscore are valid choices. Each domain has an extension (Also known as a TLD) . Extension is the part that comes after the period. The most well known domain extension is .com . But you have many other options such as .ca, .net , .org, .biz , .tv . If you purchase a domain name with an extension such as .ca you are essentially sending a subliminal message to the search engines and to your potential audience. You are essentially telling them that you are Canadian .
You can purchase a URL for around $10 / year . There are many providers that can help you with the purchase of a domain name ( http://www.netfirms.ca and http://www.godaddy.com are well known providers.)
A URL is very similar to having your own phone number. If you purchase a phone number you also need service to make the phone number to work. In the virtual world this service is called "web hosting." Your web host and your domain name provider could be to different entities. As a matter of fact many people or business use this model to make sure they get the best of both worlds. (Sometimes, domain name providers only provide low end shared hosting solutions that might not be sufficient or suitable for you to run your website. ) If you would like to use a different web host all you need to do is to point your DNS or DNS records to the location where your web host provider will provide you.
Attention: If you have a existing website and if you are changing your web host each time you make a change to the DNS or DNS records you risk of people not being able to see your website and your e-mails if you are hosting them under the same domain. In other words your website and your e-mails could potentially go down. Because this information needs to go through all around the world and needs to be syncronized (This is called the propagation time and it could take from anywhere between couple of hours to 48 hours)
Once you have your website address and web hosting in place you will need to start thinking about what you would like to put in that space. Here is an anology: it is similar to having an empty house. You need to fill it with furniture . In other words, content such as images , text , video ,etc. needs to be in there to provide useful information to people who will be visiting your website. The job of a web designer is to present a group of content together in a fashion where the page is understandable to your audiance and fashinable to attract new visitors to your website. We designers often work together web programmers to provide your website with some dyanamism. i.e. Web forms such as "contact us" forms are usually dyanmic elements of a website. And it is usually the job of a web programmer to make it work the way you would like it to function.