High-level Steps for Getting Your Own Web Site

1. Decide what web hosting solution you want to use. Web Hosting typically costs around $5 a month for basic service, so that's about $60 a year.

2. Purchase a domain name from a site that does Domain Name registration. For a .com it will typically cost around $10 to $11 a year.
   Note: Your web hosting might offer one free domain name registration. If it does, then you can skip this step.

• You may be asked to choose Private Registration or not. Details: When you register a domain name your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address will be made available unless you pay to have it be private. Diane's Advice: Personally I don't see a problem with making it public. I haven't experienced any problems with this.

• You may be asked to choose to make your domain a Certified Domain or not. Details: What this does is it provides you with a seal that you can place on your site to give visitors the assurance that this is a legitimate site. Diane's Advice: You probably would only be interested in this if you primarily plan to sell things on your site.

• You may need to update the Name Servers with the provider you used to purchase your Domain Name. You would want to use the Name Server(s) given to you by your web hosting service.

3. Now your ready to actually create your web site. Remember to start simple and just get the important information on your site.
   Tips:

• I recommend that you find a web site that you like and try to mimic the parts of it that you like. If you're really brave, you can view their source to see how they did it. In your browser go to View > Page Source (Firefox) or View > Source (IE).

• Don’t forget to test your new website within different browsers, for example here’s a list of browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome. I recommend testing in IE and Firefox at a minimum.