What You Need to Build a Website
1) Domain Name
The domain name creates the address of your site.
Domain names are paid for yearly.
Looking for a FREE site?
I never endorse free webhosts. They are too unstable, you never really own your site and you do not receive a true domain name. Instead your address will be something like http://freesite.yourdomain.com. In some cases, the domain may be even longer.
2) Web Host
A website cannot exist without a web host. This is the company that houses your files and provides the environment for you to create and save pages to the Internet.
Web hosts are usually paid for monthly (some are yearly).
3) Web Building Software
Some web hosts provide website building tools so you do not need any additional software. It's important you find out about this before you sign up with any host.
If you don't use any software, then you will need to learn how to code HTML from scratch. All you do is open a text editor (Notepad or BBEdit for example) and then write the HTML that will create your page. It's pretty easy to learn.
Then you save the file as filename.html and save it to the Internet through your web host.
4) Selling Products
Want to sell products and take orders from your site? The best way to do this is to sign up with Paypal.com. They are a free merchant that will accept credit cards for you and they take a small percentage of each order. It's convenient and super easy to setup.
All you do is specify the price(s) for your goods and PayPal will give you the HTML code to paste into your site and it automatically creates the payment button and checkout interface for you.
PayPal handles all the credit card transactions for you. You can also link them to your checking account and have the funds transferred into your bank account electronically.
