How do you make a website? I have been trying for 5 weeks and it has not been working. I'm starting to get REALLY mad!!

Faced with the question "How do you make a website?" I find myself wanting to ask a whole host of questions before I can even attempt to answer what appears to be a rather basic request. Obviously with so many web sites on the Internet there is a massive diversity is style and design and purpose. Web sites range from a simple one free site displaying family photographs to the professional $multi-million company sites with an incredible range in between. For the sake of simplicity I shall assume that you just want to test the water in creating a website.

Firstly the very fact that you are reading a HubPage means that you are on the right track. Hubpages offers a simple to follow wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) point, click and type interface to create a useful web page. The interface is really so simple there is virtually no need to explain the process. OK so this may not be a complete web site but you can easily put together a number of hubs within a very short space of time and at zero cost. Your hubs can, effectively, become a mini site within the larger site, especially if you focus upon a specific topic or niche. However the great thing about this interface is the similarity between it and many others available on the Internet. So, once you have mastered the creation of Hubs, you will be able to create your very first web site with ease.

When I built my very first website I did it in a process of trial and error using no more than Notepad. All I did was change a few lines of code and watched what happened. I did this on the free space that came with my ISP account. Back then it was a whopping 1mb or 2mb and these days you can get 1gb email accounts for free! Anyway this gave me a grounding in HTML which is the basic programming language used to create a web page. While there are many professional tools available to create sites which use both wysiwyg and code interfaces to get started there is simply no need to spend the incredible amounts of cash to buy these products, plus you can create many sites without once having to even look at HTML code. This means that virtually anybody can create a site within minutes and I do mean minutes.

While I am immensely proud of some of the sites I have created over the years, some of which have in excess of 10,000 pages, I spend most of my time these days playing around creating free sites, hubs and Squidoo lenses using simple interfaces similar to HubPages. Stragely I no longer spend much time on forums and I see a strong similarity between the two, especially with regards to ease of use and the community aspects.

I would suggest that to make your first website you first try creating a few Hubs as Hubpages.com. Then, when you are feeling a little more adventurous, you can try a hand at creating a blog. A blog is, in essence, a web site and places like Blogger and Wordpress offer you the facility to create free blogs. The advantage to using Wordpress is that it is not only free but there is a massive amount of information and free help available. This help and advice is really for those folk who have already created their first blog or web site and wish to add more functionality and improve the appearance. Using an interface similar to HubPages you can create a fair number of pages and an incredibly useful site in no time at all.

Another advantage to using Wordpress for your first website is that it is one of the most widely used pieces of blog software. Once you are ready to expand your virtual real estate you can embark upon the creation of a web site from the ground up and the "standalone" version of the software is superbly put together so that the jump is not too difficult to comprehend and the process of installation is actually very easy if you follow the comprehensive instructions.

So, for free or minimal cost you can quickly build a website. Furthermore virtually all the tools, plugins (elements added to enhance the visitors experience) and even website templates are free. A wordpress template can radically change the appearance of your site by simply uploading the files provided to a folder on your server and following the simple instructions. You can actually install a number of templates and switch between them from within your blog interface until you decide which is best for your website.

If you decide to create hubs and blogs on a particular topic or niche it is always a good idea to keep articles unique, that is do not post the same piece of writing to your hub, your blog and other sites that you may have. Rather write different pieces for each even if they are on the exact same topic. It is then perfectly reasonable to provide links on one to the other if the page you are linking to provides further, or complimentary, information on the same topic. In this way you are able to provide the maximum information on any topic presented in various ways. A great idea is to have a go at creating a video which you can host on one of the many video sites but include in your free sites without using up all your free space.

Who knows maybe one day you will be creating a corporate website for a large company, or, better still, creating a website for your very own company.