New webmasters guide

So you've decided to become a Webmaster? Although it is relatively easy to become a webmaster it is not quite as simple as building a page and it magically appearing on the Internet. In this guide you will learn the basics of getting your first website online.

1. Building Your Site - There is more to becoming a Webmaster than just using a WYSIWYG (an editor that you design in a visual environment) editor like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Front Page. We would strongly recommend you learning HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language), which is the language which web pages are written in and I think if you speak to anyone who has been doing web developing for over a year they will tell you that it is essential to learn it. The best way to learn HTML is from a book but there are many free online guides that will help you on your way. Even if you do learn HTML that doesn't mean that now you can't use a WYSIWYG editor, many designers still use one to get there layout just right and then edit the code manually but there is nothing stopping you use a WYSIWYG editor all the time.
   If you have any questions about building a website post them in our forums in our web design forums at or if you have finished your site and would like someone to review your hard work please post a request In our website review forums
2. Find a domain name - A domain name is your Internet address (e.g. http://www.siteowners.com is this site's domain name). It is recommended that you buy a domain name, so that you start building your site's fame from the very first moment. Try to find a short and easy to remeber one. To register a domain name use the form below. It costs just $15 dollars to register it for one year, which is a very competitive price at the moment.

3. Find a web Host - You can't just put your page anywhere on the Internet, to have your page on the Internet you need a host. Most new webmasters are looking for a free web host. It is essential that the host you choose is reliable so that your site is not down for hours and your emails are never read. Our suggestion for a free web host is Bizland.com If you can afford to pay for hosting, you will get more advanced features. We highly recommend the company that hosts Siteowners.com, Verio Inc. If you have any questions at all about hosting please post them in our hosting forum where our members and moderators will be very happy to help you out.
4. Make money!!! - It is a lot harder than many people think to make serious money from your website but it is still quite easy to find a sponsor and make a bit of cash from all you hard work. If you want to find a sponsor look our list of trustworthy sponsors that you could use on your site.
5. Promote - Well you have everything you need for a successful website now, but something is missing…. visitors. There are ranges of things you can do to promote your site but one of the most important things is to get listed in the search engines like altavista.com and yahoo.com. To do this your will need meta tags in the pages on your site. To make this easy for you we have a free meta tag generator online which generates the code that you simply copy and past into your pages. Once you have meta tags you need to submit your site to search engines. Submitting your site to each search engine is a bit of a daunting task, that's why we have an online search engine submitter, which submits your site to the top 20 search engines for free! A cheap and effective way of advertising is through pay-per-performance search engines. GoTo is the best one and we have written a review explaining how you can get up to 100 targeted visitors for each dollar you spend.

The work doesn't stop here, once you have finished the steps above you could work on improving your websites and your web design skills. If you want to improve your skills you are in the write place, just look through our wide range of articles that will help you and if you have any questions no matter how trivial or how stupid they seem post them in our forums. Once you improve your skills you can keep improving your site but in the mean time you might want to look at our list of website add-ons which range from free customisable news to free online polls.