- by
Mike J
OK, before you even think about choosing a web host, there are things you will need obtain first as well as important factors you will need to take into consideration. Firstly, you need to decide on what kind of website you wish to create. Will it simply be a small personal homepage for yourself and/or your friends or are you planning on launching something a bit more ambitious, such as an online business?
Believe it or not, the type of website you have in mind will seriously effect the direction in which you should take in choosing the right web host that is right for you. You will find out why, later on in this topic. An important factor to consider is how you will be building your website. It is NOT a case of uploading a Word or text document and a few pictures onto the internet, because this will NOT work. Websites are made up of special code that your web browser (such as Internet Explorer for example) interprerates, processes and returns as text, pictures and links on your monitor. Simple websites that are merely made up of text and pictures are built and designed using HTML.
HTML is an acronym which stands for Hypertext Transfer Markup Language. This may sound rather scary to somebody new to the internet, but, with the right tutorials, (and a lot of dedication) you will quickly gain an understanding of it all. More advanced websites that process user data, though mediums such as contact and signup forms or ecommerce online stores that store and return user data, powered by online databases, use more complicated code such as PHP and Javascript. There are a lot of ebooks on the internet that give tutorials on how to build websites and how to understand languages such as HTML and PHP.
