Imagine you were born a few centuries ago, and wanted to
learn about something. You’d have to travel several hundreds of thousands
miles, for days, maybe weeks. Or you wrote to a loved one living far away.
Waiting for days to get a response. Seems hard doesn’t it?
Lucky for you, all you have to do today is just press a
button. Need to know about some complicated physics concept? Or maybe you want
to know how to cook that delicious thing you saw on TV. The solution is simple,
look it up on the web, Google it, look it up on YouTube, or other several
hundreds of thousands of sites. Boy, our ancestors must be really jealous.
Whatever that exists, it can be found on the web, to look at
or even buy in most cases. I say most because you can’t buy the Great Pyramids
of Giza.
This tutorial is going to be the first of the many that will
follow, to teach you how to exist on the web. How to make yourself known
throughout the civilized world. You don’t need to be a programmer or an IT
expert, you don’t need to be great at turning it off and on again, and you just
need to have a computer, an internet connection and an attention span longer
than a goldfish. Yes, we’re going to teach you how to create a website, without
writing a single piece of code!!
Now to introduce a few things that you are going to need to
know in order to start:
1)
Hosting and
domain: First off, you need to know about what a website hosting and
domain are. To explain this in the most of the simplest terms, consider this.
You live in a home, right? (I’m guessing you do). Now your home has an address.
Hosting and domain are similar. Hosting is where your website lives and domain
is the address. You upload a website to a hosting website, they keep it there
on their servers. That’s like the home of your website. Now how are people
going to know how to visit your site? For that there is the domain name,
something like your house address. To give a few examples of domain names:
Now, google.com and aura.com are
domain names. You enter the address and your internet browser takes you to the
website. So, the hosting is where you website lives, and domain is its address,
the way to visit it. You need to buy hosting and domain services from third
parties at monthly/yearly basis. But we’re going to show you how to keep it
free.
2) Wordpress: Wordpress is a free online
blogging software. It’s easy to use and can create multipurpose responsive
websites for any possible purpose. It has thousands of themes and plugins
available online. Some are free, some come at a price. Plugins are a means of
extending the functionality of site. You can virtually do everything with them.
You’re going to need a few for your site as well. We’ll show which ones you
need and how to use them. Some come with theme you decide to use.
3) Search engine optimization (SEO): When your
website is ready and online, you’d want people to be able to find it easily.
Let’s say you sell guitars and other instruments online. Someone goes to
Google, writes “buy a good guitar”, and then a long list of search results show
up. SEO is the technique to make sure you’re among the lucky ones to appear on
the first page. The higher you appear, the more likely people are to visit your
website. No one will go to the tenth page looking for your website (except you)
to buy a guitar. They will go with the first or maybe second result on the
first page. To make sure you appear in the first page of search results, we’re
going to use a technique called Search Engine optimization or SEO for short.
Don’t worry if you don’t completely understand the concept. We’ll explain more
as we go further.
That concludes our today’s tutorial. Now for your homework,
Google and make a list of various hosting and domain service providers, try to
see which ones are better, which ones are free and differences in the free and
paid services. Learn more about what Wordpress is and what they do. Don’t worry
we’ll teach you how to use it in the upcoming lectures. If you have any
questions, leave them in the comments.
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