Overview
This article walks you through the following steps to create a website, display it online, and attract visitors:
- Step 1 — Setting up hosting and a domain
- Step 2 — Building your website
- Step 3 — Adding email
- Step 4 — Optimizing your site
- Step 5 — Attracting visitors
Prerequisites
You will need to own the domain registration (your website URL) for your website to appear online.
- If you have already purchased it — you can transfer it to Dreamhost when signing up for an account. Alternatively, you can also transfer it at any time in the future.
- If you have not purchased it yet — you can purchase it during sign up.
How to build a website
The following steps guide you through the process of creating a website.
Setting up hosting and a domain
The first step is to create a DreamHost account with a hosting plan.
1: Choose a hosting plan — You first need to decide which type of hosting plan you'd like to purchase. This will be the server your website uses to appear on the Internet. Examples of hosting plans include Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and DreamPress hosting.
2: Purchase the account — Once you have decided on the hosting plan, you can sign up for a DreamHost account.
Purchase a domain registration
A domain registration is the ownership of a domain name, such as example.com. You cannot host (display) your website online until you own the registration. The following options are available:
- During the sign-up process, you can either purchase a new domain registration or transfer an existing domain registration to DreamHost.
- If you have already purchased the domain registration at a different company and don't want to transfer it to DreamHost, you can simply point the DNS to DreamHost. This option allows you to keep the registration at a different company while hosting the domain online on DreamHost's servers.
3: Add the domain to your hosting plan — See the Adding a website and hosting article for instructions on adding hosting to your domain so it appears online.
Building your website
Now that your site is hosted on your DreamHost server, you can begin to build it.
There are many different options available to build a website. Some options (such as a CMS) are easier and allow you to create a site without needing to code anything. Other options are more difficult but allow for greater customization over your site.
Option 1 — Using a CMS (Easiest option: No coding required)
A Content Management System (CMS) is pre-built software you install onto your site. This software creates a fully functioning website without any coding required.
WordPress — The most popular CMS option is WordPress. DreamHost offers this as both a DreamHost WordPress install or as a specialized upgraded hosting plan called DreamPress (optimized for simplicity and performance).
Option 2 — Building a custom website (Difficult, but offers more customization)
You could also manually build your website on your home computer and upload it to your DreamHost server. This requires you to have basic knowledge of website programming. Here are a few links to help you with building a website:
- W3Schools — Free tutorials on how to build a website.
- codingheroes.io — Many free resources to help learn how to code a website.
- htmldog.com — Many free resources to help learn how to code a website.
Create a MySQL database — If your custom website requires a database, you will need to manually create one in the panel and upload your existing database to it.
Upload your site to your server — Once you've developed your site on your home computer, upload the content to your DreamHost server using an FTP client.
Optimizing your site
After your website is set up on the server and displays online, you should spend time optimizing it so it runs faster and appears correctly on different devices. See the following links for further information:
- Optimization / Site Slowness guides
- Optimize CMS software
- General WordPress optimization techniques
- Joomla optimization
- VPS optimization overview (some additional steps you can take to optimize the server itself)
Attracting visitors
Once your site is up and running, you need to publicize it to attract visitors.
Submitting your site to search engines
Allowing your site to be indexed by search engines helps display your site in search results. Visit the major search engines and submit your URL. Most of these sites allow you to create an account where you may submit your site to their database. For example:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Making small adjustments to your site helps search engines crawl and classify your content. This, in turn, helps push your site up in search results: