1.Get Your Domain Name

The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your website. For example, the domain name of the website you're reading is "thesitewizard.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with the name.

It may also be wise to take a look at some of the Important Precautions to Take When Buying a Domain Name, just so that you don't commit the same mistakes that some newcomers make when buying a domain name.

2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account

A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is analogous to renting office or shop premises for your business.

There are many issues involved in finding a good web host. Read up on the various things you need to look for in searching for a good web host in the article How to Choose a Web Host.

After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain to that account on your web host.

3. Designing your Web Pages

Once you have settled your domain name and web host, the next step is to design the web site itself. In this article, I will assume that you will be doing this yourself. If you are hiring a web designer to do it for you, you can probably skip this step, since that person will handle it on your behalf.

Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to get a basic web page onto your site.

There are many commercial and free web editors around. For those who don't mind spending money on a good commercial web editor, one of the most highly-regarded WYSIWYG web editors is Dreamweaver.

An integral part of web design is search engine readiness. Search engine promotion does not start after the web site is made. It starts at the web design stage.

There are many other issues regarding the design of web pages. The above will get you started. However, if you have the time after you get something out onto the web.

4.Testing Your Website

Although I list this step separately, this should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step adequately.

You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. Since all these browsers are free anyway, it should not be any hardship to get them and install them.

One way to improve your chances that your website will work in future versions of the web browsers is to make sure your web pages' code validate as correct (that is, the underlying code has no errors). You can read more about this in HTML and CSS Validation: Should You Validate Your Web Page? There are numerous free web page validators listed on the Free HTML Validators, Broken Link Checkers, Browser Compatibility Checkers page.

5.Collecting Credit Card Information, Making Money

If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information.

6.Getting Your Site Noticed

When your site is ready, you will need to submit it to search engines like Google and Bing.

In general, if your site is already linked to by other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines. They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.

Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. You can even advertise in the various search engines. Although I only mentioned Google in that article, since that was the topic of that discussion, you can also advertise in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo!. This has the potential of putting your advertisement near the top of the search engine results page, and possibly even on other websites.

There are also less obvious ways of promoting your website, which you might want to look into.

Conclusion

Naturally the above guide is not exhaustive. It is a distillation of some of the essential steps in getting started with your site. If you want more information, you should read the other articles on thesitewizard.com. However, the above tutorial should be enough to help you put your website on the Internet.