Although you can actually start learning how to make your own website without having a web host (I’ll talk about this in a later installment of this series), finding a web host first can provide you with some shortcuts that you might want to think about using.

Are you more interested in learning the nuts and bolts of making a website from the ground up ("hand-coding" your own site), or are you more interested in getting your own website up and running right away?

If you’re interested in leaning how to build a site from the ground up, it’s my intention to teach you exactly how to do that - step by step - in future installments of this series. Just stay tuned.

But if you’re more interested in getting something up and running right away, you should think about finding a host that offers either the option to automatically install essentially complete sites (like a blog or a bulletin board/forum site) or some sort of site building tools with their hosting package.

One host that I can highly recommend from personal experience is midPhase Hosting; they offer cPanel with Fantastico (which can automatically install Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, or any one of a number of other packages) and a site-building tool called that lets you start with a basic template, choose color schemes, add graphics, etc. And they’re pretty cheap, too; like $7.95 a month (and on top of everything else, they’ll give you a free domain name for life with that plan)…

Before you start to make your website, you should spend some time thinking about a domain name. Your domain name is kinda like the title of a book, and it’ll play a major role in setting up your users’ expectations of your site before they ever get there, so it should play a major role in your own choices about the "look and feel" of your site.

Think of it this way: If you wrote a kid’s book titled, "The Little Red Firetruck", you’d expect the publisher to make it look like a kid’s book about a little red firetruck; if the design they came up with for the book made it look more like "War and Peace", you might start looking for a new publisher.

Same thing with your domain name: What do you want it to say to your visitor about your site before they even get there? And what does your visitor expect to see once they arrive?

Once you’ve got a general idea of the kind of domain name you’d like, there are some online tools that will help you find available domain names that you can register (this is a whole other subject, but the short version is you have to register your domain name with an accredited registrar before you can use it to point to your website).

nameboy (http://www.nameboy.com/) is a pretty cool online domain-name generating tool; you put in a word or two that relate to your site’s theme or subject matter, and it comes up with suggestions. But as much as I like it, I wouldn’t pay $15 a year to register a domain through their link, when they can be had for less than half that. Just google "domain name registration" and you’ll find a bunch.

But price isn’t the only consideration, either; godaddy is probably the biggest registrar out there, and you’ll see them advertising $6.95 domain names all over the web, but they won’t sell you a "dot com" domain name for that cheap, and they’ll "upsell" you to death, whatever you buy.

Look around, and when you’ve found the registrar with a price you like, make sure to google their name and the word "sucks" or "rip-off" or other words that will find complaints about them. You have to take online complaints with a grain of salt (because maybe the person who posted it has some other axe to grind, or maybe they’re just the competition), but if you see page after page of google results for "my registrar sucks", I’d try whoever was second on your list; the hassles you may have with the one everybody hates will probably not be worth the money you save.

BTW: If you have Dreamweaver (or access to it), and don’t have time to wait for me to continue this series, you might want to check out this series of video tutorials that claims to teach you how to create a website with Dreamweaver in less than an hour:

Dreamweaver Made Simple

There are plenty of ways for you to learn how to make your own website; some of them take time, some of them take money. Back in 1995, I saw that my band had to have a website, but we didn’t have the money to hire a web developer, so I decided I’d spend some time learning how to do it on my own. (I won’t torture you with the URL to that first site; suffice it to say that it was, up until that moment, the world’s worst website. But I got better at it…)

Self-study is a great way to learn certain types of skills (assuming you’ve got the time and the motivation, and you’re the type of person that leans well in the "School of Hard Knocks"), and building websites is a skill that lends itself pretty well to self-study (personally, I wouldn’t hire a heart surgeon who was self-taught myself, but maybe that’s just me).

But self-study also has its drawbacks: for one thing, it takes a long time to learn to do anything well, and lots of people just don’t have the discipline to face that kind of challenge alone. For another, when you’re just starting out, any advice looks as good as any other advice, and you can waste a lot of time learning the wrong stuff.

So I thought I’d do a series of short tutorials on how to make your own website and put them up here for anyone that wandered by looking for that kind of information. Apparently, that’s you. If you find what I write here useful, keep coming back. If not, there are countless other sites out there that will help you get to where you want to go.