Several years ago, on a sudden whim while all our friends were buying homes in a new neighborhood, we reached early morning to register for a home ourselves. Our top two bids were not accepted as someone ahead in the line picked up the available plots. We immediately snagged the next best plot, signed the paperwork and gave a deposit for registration. In a couple of weeks, we finalized the design, interiors and exterior of the house and about 9 months later we were the proud owners of an awesome home. A lot more went in building it, but this is a short version.
Now you wonder what this has to do with your website building experience. Similar to my above experience would be your experience of building a virtual home on the internet. You first need to decide if the location (also known as domain name) is available. A domain name is a unique name that identifies an internet resource like a website. Using the domain name, people navigate to your website (there are other ways also such as from a search engine). Many of the really nice domain names have already been taken up so you will have to find the one that best works for you.
Once you are the proud owner of the domain (website name), you have to figure out where you would like your website to reside at. This is called “web hosting”. In the online world, you have many options to decide about it. You can host it on a machine that sits in your home, on the cloud server or with one of the many hosting providers that are available to you. The next step is the exciting part of designing your new space by defining the layout, color, fonts, images, etc. for your website. It is similar to choosing your hard wood, granite and curtains of your new home.
Now that you understand the basics of domain name, web hosting and website, in the next post, we will dive deeper.
