When you’re looking at creating a website, either for yourself or your business, you have 3 main choices.

1. Employ a professional designer/developer
2. Learn the basics yourself and build something from scratch
3. Use widely-available, affordable tools to get a great looking site without paying a designer’s expensive hourly rate

As you may have guessed, The Websiteologist is geared towards helping those who go with the third option, and showing you just how easy it can be. Yes, it’s possible to learn enough to build yourself a simple, functional site (that’s how I got my start, as I couldn’t afford professional help) but this takes time and effort, and typically the end result is less than stunning. If you have the funds, by all means employ a professional to design and build a unique site. If you don’t have the funds, or just don’t want to spend money unnecessarily, read on.

Before diving into the wide world of templates and graphics, you’re going to need two things. A domain name (the address of your site, www.thisismydomain.com) and hosting. It is possible to find free hosting, depending on the type of site you’re trying to build, but I’d recommend against it for a number of reasons. You probably don’t want advertising on your site that’s out of your control and makes you no money, for example. We have a selection of some of the best known and trustworthy companies for both hosting and domains.

Once those are sorted out you should decide whether your site requires some sort of CMS. Are you blogging, selling, do you just need one page with a paragraph about you and a contact form? With more experience usually comes a preference for one CMS over others but for beginners we’ve put together this handy little comparison of the leading free options. You heard me, this part is free.

Well done, the boring parts are over. Now you get to do the fun bit, making it look gorgeous. If you’re looking for an out-of-the-box solution, you can start browsing our excellent collection of templates. Here’s a list of things to look for when buying. Alternatively, if you’re just looking to save money on the design, an option is to use a PSD template and hand this off to a coder to turn into a working site. While this approach still costs money for the coder, it saves a lot of money and time on the design side.

That should cover all the basic things you need to think about. You can find more help and tutorials in our blog and if you have a specific area you’d like to see covered in a tutorial feel free to send suggestions via our contact form.