It cannot be denied that having a website to host your personal portfolio, serve as the home of your blog, or run an online business is almost a necessity in the 21st Century. Having an online presence can be instrumental in growing your enterprise and getting your work seen by a wide audience. The Internet levels the playing field for individuals and entrepreneurs by eliminating the need for brick-and-mortar storefronts or expensive print or broadcast advertising. Everyone has an equal chance of getting noticed on the web.
Perhaps you have a great idea for a blog that you think could really take off and potentially change the world. Maybe you have less lofty goals and just want to sell your incredibly useful widget to the masses. You know that in order to have the best chance of success you need to create a website for yourself or your business. But you may have some reservations about taking on such a daunting task. After all, it has to cost a lot to build a website, right?
While you can indeed spend a considerable amount of money having your website created by professional web designers and developers, that is not the only option available to you if you desire to have an online presence via a website. You don’t need to take out a loan to get on the web. We are going to show you how to build a WordPress website for $100 or less.
Getting Started – Preliminary Tasks
There are two things that you need to do before you can start to build your website. You need to obtain and register a domain name and you need to select a website hosting service. Your web hosting service is the entity that gets you up on the web, and your domain name is your address on the Internet, something like “mygreatsite.com.”
When you are first creating your website you probably will want to register your domain name at the same place you buy your web hosting. Most web hosting services will register the domain name for you. Registering the domain name should cost you around $10 to $15 dollars, depending on the name you choose. This is a recurring cost as you need to re-register your domain annually or risk losing it.
In some cases, a domain name can be extremely expensive based on the words it contains and the likelihood that it will prove popular in search engines. Careful selection of your domain name will keep that cost under control.
Web hosting is essential for your website, as it provides the server and storage space that gets your site up and visible on the web. There are many types of web-hosting options available to you, and choosing the wrong one can be a costly mistake.
When you are first starting out and are attempting to create your website for under $100, you should be looking at shared web hosting. In a shared environment, the hosting provider has multiple websites running on a single server which helps minimize the cost to each of those website owners.
Other options are substantially more expensive and are not required for most applications. According to hostingadvice.com, you should expect to pay between $2 and $10 dollars a month for shared hosting fees. If you are truly committed to keeping your budget under $100 dollars just shop around a bit and you will be able to find some inexpensive shared web hosting.
Those two expenses are the only financial costs that you will incur when setting up your website. How can that be, you might ask? Read on, prospective website owner, and we will explain.
Creating the Website
Now that you have a domain name and your web hosting all sorted out, the fun part begins. This is where you actually design and develop your website. You could hire a team of professional web developers and pay a boatload of money to create your site. But there is a better and much less expensive way. Do it yourself using WordPress and in many instances, there will be no additional cost to you.
According to websitesetup.org, WordPress is the driving force behind more than 30% of all websites worldwide. Considering that there are close to 2 billion websites in existence, this is an incredibly large base of installed WordPress implementations. All these users can’t be wrong, so what is the allure of WordPress and why should you use it to create your website?
The first quality that you will like about WordPress is that is free. WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) and website creation tool that is designed to allow a non-programmer to design a website that has a professional look and feel to it. Combine the fact that it is free with the power it affords the novice web designer and you can begin to understand why WordPress is so popular.
If you choose to go with WordPress as your web creation tool, you will have access to thousands of free themes that have been designed to work with the platform. A theme is a way to customize your site to get just the look you want and will give you control over where items are placed, fonts, colors and other design features of your web pages.
Customize Your Website’s Functionality
While themes are great to change the look of your site, WordPress plugins are another resource that you will have at your disposal as you design your site. Plugins are small pieces of code that perform specific functions like gathering contact information or presenting a Google Analytics dashboard. Some plugins come with a cost, but many are free to use and easily add features to your website that would be hard for a non-programmer to implement.
Conclusion
There you have it. All you need to pay for is a domain name and a web hosting service. After that, you can take advantage of free tools and create an outstanding website for under $100.
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