Create a website in 10 steps | A comprehensive guide for beginners

Having a website on the Internet has become a necessity. Most people today are connected to the Internet and rely on it primarily as a source of information about any business or service before dealing with it. Therefore, it is necessary that you take care of creating a website for yourself or your business to prove your presence in this digital world.

This article provides you with a comprehensive and detailed guide to learning how to create a website and explains to you all the available options and methods that you can rely on to create your website, along with an explanation of the most important differences between them. In the end, it also provides you with a set of important tips to help you succeed in the process of creating a website, whether this website is a simple blog to publish your diaries and advice for your website visitors, or an introductory website that introduces people to your business, or an online store that sells products online, or an electronic portal or other types of websites. Table of Contents What is a website? What are the ways to create a website 1- Create a website by programming it from scratch.

2-Create a website using a content management system. 3-Create a website using website building tools. 4- Create a website using Blogger Steps to create a website using WordPress 1- Determine the specialty and goal of the site 2- Reserve a domain name suitable for your site 3- Purchase web hosting for the site. 4- Connect the domain to the hosting 5- Install WordPress on the hosting: 6- Choose a suitable template for your site 7- Install the necessary additions to your site 8- Create your site content.

9- Create a backup copy of the site. 10- Promote your website How do I create a successful website?

What is a website? A website is a phrase

It is a group of linked web pages that are stored or hosted on a computer known as a web server that is constantly connected to the Internet. The Site's web pages are hyperlinked to each other and share a common design. It is encoded using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and the website may also contain additional documents and files such as images, videos, etc.

Every website has an IP address and a URL through which this website is accessed. The address is typed into the web browser and the requested website is displayed by the web server. The site must have at least a home page, which is the first page that appears when a visitor types the address of this site. It should be noted that there are two main types of websites: the website may be static or static, and the website may be dynamic.

The way the server returns the requested information differs in each type. In a static website: web pages are returned by the server as they are, as the site pages are static files that were previously created using simple languages ​​known as front-end languages ​​such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this type of website, there is no processing of content at the server level, meaning that the web pages are returned quickly as they are, without any change on the part of the server, and without the need for any interaction with databases.

static website. In a dynamic website, web pages are returned by the server after they are processed. The page is created and built at runtime according to the user’s request with the help of server-side scripting languages ​​known as back-end languages, such as PHP. It needs to interact with databases using languages ​​such as SQL to obtain the required information from it and include it on the page. Finally, after the required page is formed, it is displayed to the user in HTML format.

Dynamic website What are the ways to create a website? When an entity decides that it wants to create an electronic website, there are many decisions that must be made regarding this website. Perhaps the most important decision is to determine the method or methodology you will use to build this website. In fact, there are many methods that can be followed to create a website, and these methods differ in ease of use, the features they provide, and their cost as well.

To help you make the most appropriate decision, here is an explanation of the most prominent of these methods: 1- Create a website by programming it from scratch. Hand Coding Creating a website from scratch (Code From Scratch) was initially the basic way to create any website. This method requires programming skills and basic knowledge of web programming languages, whether related to the front end or back end.

You need to learn HTML to create the basic elements of your site's pages, learn CSS to format those elements to suit your brand, and learn JavaScript to add advanced functionality to your site. You also need to learn one of the back-end languages ​​such as PHP, Java, C#, or others. You also need to learn how to create the appropriate databases for your site and how to query them in custom languages ​​such as SQL to fetch data from them and display them on web pages.

If you want to make any changes to your site, no matter how simple, you must modify the code of the site files directly. The method of programming a website with special programming and customizing it from scratch according to your requirements may be ideal, especially for websites that need custom design and requirements, but as you can see, it is not an easy task and it takes time and effort to learn it and create your website through it. You can of course hire a specialized web developer to program and design your website for you from scratch according to your specific requirements, but the cost of developing the website from scratch remains more expensive than the rest of the other options.

If you do not have the skills to write code and do not have enough time to learn to build a website from scratch, modify it, and maintain it, and you do not want to hire a website developer and pay exorbitant costs to develop and maintain the website, they can look at other available options that enable you to create a website more easily and at lower costs than private programming. 2- Create a website using a content management system (CMS). Content management systems, or what is known for short (CMS), are software applications that allow you to create and manage websites without the need to write the programming code for everything on the site from scratch. Content management systems provide beginners with the ability to easily create a website, add content to it, manage it, modify it, and publish it, all within easy-to-use interfaces that hide the details of the code from you.

Content systems also enable you to customize the appearance of your site and expand the functions that can be performed on the site through templates, software add-ons, or ready-made software modules that you can use directly on your site without the need to program them yourself. Some content management systems are open source, and therefore in these systems you can access all the code for the system itself or for external add-ons and templates and modify them according to your requirements. You can also program and develop your own add-ons and templates from scratch if you have sufficient programming knowledge for that, but you do not have to do that and you can benefit from the efforts of the programmers who provide them to you for free or for a fee. Hundreds of content management systems are available today, but we recommend using secure and open source systems.

Perhaps the most famous of these systems is WordPress, which is the most famous open source content management system in the world. It first appeared in 2003 and today operates more than a third of the websites in the world, and Drupal, which is one of the most powerful open source content management systems. Joomla is also considered one of the prominent names in open source content management systems. All of the above-mentioned systems are written in PHP to manage content on the web. They also use MySQL/MariaDB database management systems to store and manage content. It is worth noting that there are other content management systems written in different languages, such as Python, Java, or JavaScript, and the way the system is set up and deals with content varies depending on the language used.

Content management systems are witnessing increasing popularity. There are millions of websites today on the Internet that were created with one of the content systems. Because these systems enable you to create professional websites easily, quickly, and at acceptable costs, and they do not require you to have technical knowledge - although technical knowledge in web programming languages ​​is considered a helpful factor for advanced site customization within the content management system itself - if one of the content management systems suits your needs, and you can customize it to suit the requirements of your website, it is preferable to rely on it to save time and effort. Otherwise, you can rely on the previous option and program your site from scratch. I advise you to watch the following video, which compares the use of special website programming and creating a website through the WordPress system, so that you can determine the best option when creating a website.

Our WordPress website in Arabic, for example, is built using the WordPress system. We chose it because it is a free, open source system that allows creating a website easily. It is flexible and customizable. It also includes thousands of templates and add-ons that expand the site’s functionality. It has distinguished technical support. It also receives periodic updates to improve its performance and resolve its security vulnerabilities, and most importantly of all, it suits the requirements of our site. In a later paragraph of the article, we will explain the detailed steps for creating a website based on this system.

It should be noted that when we talk about WordPress, here we implicitly mean the self-hosted WordPress.org, which provides you with greater freedom in creating your site, and not the self-hosted WordPress.com, because there are differences between them, and you can find out the most important of these differences by reading the following article. Read also: What is WordPress?

What are its advantages?

How can I create a website using it? 3-Create a website using website building tools. Website Builders enable you to create a website easily and quickly without the need to have any design skill or prior technical experience.

Creating a website with these tools is closer to the process of creating a PowerPoint presentation, either by providing ready-made templates or through drag-and-drop interfaces to enable you to focus on design and content during the website creation process. The following web platforms: Weebly, Site123, Wix, Weblium are examples of website building tool platforms that you can rely on to create websites for free or at an acceptable price. All you have to do is choose from one of the templates available from the tool, drag and drop it or customize it according to your site requirements, add the required content to the site and you will have a ready-made website in just a few clicks.

If you adopt this method, be sure to choose the website builder that best suits your needs. Some of these tools, such as Wix, for example, contain e-commerce functions if you want to build a simple online store and sell some products through it. But it is worth noting that there are website building tools such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and Squarespace that are more dedicated to creating and managing online stores easily, so it is preferable to rely on them if you want to create websites specialized in e-commerce.

Read also: Learn about the best website for creating an online store. Despite the ease of this method of creating websites, using website building tools, especially free ones, often results in sites that are slow to load compared to other websites. Also, you do not control the code and only design, and this design may result in chaotic and disorganized codes that insist on the site’s rank in the search engine. It may also provide you with limited designs only and does not enable you to create websites with custom designs, and thus the appearance of your site will be similar to hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites. While content management systems are considered more flexible in modification and customization when compared to website building tools, thanks to the many external plugins and templates available in them.

Therefore, website builders are generally not suitable for professional websites. 4- Creating a website using Blogger Blogger is a free, hosted and secure blogging platform that can be considered a type of website building tools that we explained in the previous paragraph, but it is a service limited to creating electronic blogs. It is provided by Google completely free of charge, and Google also provides 15 GB of free cloud storage.

All you have to do is create a Google account and you will be able to create an electronic blog in just a few minutes. After creating a Google account, go to the Blogger website, then register using your Google account. Click on the option (Create a new blog). Then choose a name, title, and topic for your blog. After that, you can configure the blog settings, choose a template for it, and edit the layout of your blog.

The Blogger platform provides many free templates that you can use on your site, and it also enables you to upload a template from an external source. But if you want to change the appearance of your blog, and customize the design according to specific requirements, you will need to have an HTML ID to do so.

That's it!

Your blog will be ready online and you can start adding your posts to it. This process is also very easy and is similar to working with the Word text editor, as through Blogger you can easily insert multimedia, hyperlinks, title and subtitles into your posts, and you can also add quotes, tables, headings, bullet lists, etc. The Blogger platform is considered a suitable platform for creating a personal blog or creating a simple website as a website introducing yourself or your business without paying any costs, and it is usually the first choice for beginner bloggers.

But the most notable negative aspect of creating a website through Blogger is that you are not actually the owner of your blog, but rather it is owned by Google. Although you can customize it and create content in it through a control panel as you wish, you are not actually the original owner of it and you cannot access the root directory of your site nor its database and resources, and technical support is very limited. The platform also enables you to create blogging sites only, and it is not expandable through external add-ons, as is the case with content systems that provide a huge number of external add-ons that expand the site’s work from just a simple blog to a professional site that can be customized for different goals.

Read also: What is the difference between Blogger and WordPress? (8 comparisons with a recommendation for the most appropriate one for you) Creating a free blog through 8 different platforms and how to choose the most appropriate one for you How to create a free, professional website in more than one way Steps to creating a website using WordPress The WordPress system itself is free as we mentioned before, but you need to pay for two basic things to create a WordPress website and make it accessible to your visitors, which are the domain and hosting, and this is the self-hosted part of WordPress. Below we explain the basic steps for creating a website based on WordPress: 1- Determine the specialization and purpose of the site. Before you take any practical step in creating your site using WordPress, you must first determine the specialization, type, and purpose of your site.

Determine whether your site is intended to be a blog, an introductory site for an existing business, an online store, or an electronic magazine. These things will help you determine the options in the subsequent steps of creating the site. 2- Reserve a suitable domain name for your site. You need to reserve a domain name when creating any new website on the Internet, and the domain name is what determines the unique address of your website, and enables visitors to access your site on the hosting. For example, the domain for our website is https://www.wpar.net/ and it is composed of several sections as shown in the following image.

The domain name must be related to the purpose of your site and its field of specialization that you specified in the first step. The domain name must also be short and easy to remember, and it is preferable to include keywords that indicate the activity of your site, and end with the suffix com if possible or one of the other well-known suffixes such as net or org. You can buy a domain name from any company specialized in selling domain names. You can also obtain it from the hosting company itself and transfer it from one company to another whenever you want.

Read also: What is a domain? A comprehensive explanation for beginners 3- Purchase web hosting for the site. Web hosting is a service that enables you to publish your website on the Internet and make it available to visitors, so you must obtain hosting for your site and be sure to choose good hosting with appropriate resources.

Hosting is the place that will store all the site's files, and the more resources the hosting has, the better your site's performance will be. It should be noted that some hosting companies provide you with the service of reserving a domain name and may offer it to you for free for a specific period. So you can get a domain name from the hosting company itself.

Read also: What is web hosting? What are its types? 4- Link the domain to hosting. You must now link the domain to hosting if you purchased the domain from one company and the hosting from another company.

If you purchase the hosting and domain from the same company, you will not need to do this step, and you will only need to specify the domain name that you want to use for your site when setting up your WordPress site on the hosting. Read more: How to link the domain to the hosting, and make the settings correctly 5- Install WordPress on the hosting: The steps for installing WordPress on the direct hosting server differ depending on the hosting you are using. If you choose a web host that does not offer a WordPress installer, or you want to run the site on your own server, in this case you will need to install it manually.

Fortunately, most reputable hosting companies offer easy WordPress installation with an easy-to-use setup wizard to help you get started setting up your site quickly. Learn how to download and install WordPress on your hosting. By the end of this step, you should have access to your WordPress site’s control panel, or what is known as the WordPress Dashboard, which is usually found on a link in the following form yourdomain.com/wp-admin. This is your site's operations room, and from here you will be able to control all matters related to your site and set it up easily.

WordPress website control panel 6- Choose a template suitable for your site. The template is what determines the look of your site and is the first thing a visitor notices of your site. When you install WordPress for the first time, the site will use a default template (the current default template is the 2022 template), but you can easily change this template to any other template you prefer and customize it as you wish to control the appearance of your site without affecting its content. WordPress provides you with thousands of free templates on the official template store that you can choose from and install on your website.

Choose whatever you want, and if you do not like any of them, you can purchase a paid template from a template store such as Picalica, which includes a large collection of distinctive WordPress templates and provides you with the ability to communicate with the template developer and request customization. Choose what suits you, but it is important to choose a quick template with a layout that is appropriate for the content you want to publish on the site, the language of the site, and the goal of the site as a whole. There are several ways to install the template on your site, either through your site’s control panel and choosing templates