Setting out to create a brand new website from scratch can be a daunting task - especially if its your first time round. There's a huge amount of information on the Web about where to go and what to do, but let's focus on a single basic principle that will guide the choices of software and technology made in this blog. We want to create the best possible site, but:

It's imperative that you, as the new website owner, are able to spend as much time focussing on what makes you're website important (be it a blog, making pottery, writing stories, whatever) without being distracted by building and running the website.

Setting up a website is a methodical and predicatable process so it helps to have a checklist of required tasks set out in more or less the order they need to be implemented. I've listed the main tasks below and we'll briefly discuss the most important aspects of each after:

Find a host & register a domain

I listed find a host and register a domain first for two reasons:

1. more often than not, a good hosting service will be able to register your domain for you and assign it to your new account. Much easier than registering a domain name and having it transferred.
2. you'll be surprised by how difficult it is to find a good domain name - there are businesses that specialize in registering as many domains as possible knowing that folk like you will come along wanting it, and hopefully pay for it.

When deciding on a host, don't go for the cheapest without thinking about what you need. One of the most important aspects of any hosting service is support. Services that offer you unlimited everything for only a couple of bucks a month can simply not afford to provide you with good support. Consider:

• Green geeks: environmentally friendly hosting - power generated by wind etc
• Site prebuilder: full service hosting include site installation, configuration and setup

Download website software & create website

I know, it sounds like I have glossed over quite an important and difficult phase here. I won't sugar coat things; you do have to put in some effort and combine that with a measure of stick-to-it ness, but there is no reason why anyone can't do this part themselves. Of course, you need to know what software and technologies to use to make life easy and keep costs to a minimum ($0 in this case). I recommend using:

• Drupal
• Prebuilt websites (based on Drupal)

Making use of a large, well-known and trusted open source website project not only provides quality and flexibility for free, but also a large support community (also, for free).

Deploy website & configure live server

Once you have a website that is ready for public use, you bundle it up and transfer the files across to the server hosted by whatever hosting service you selected earlier. Usually this will be done with an FTP program of some sort as the chances are the download will be fairly sizeable.

There are always going to be a number of things to take into account during this process. File permissions are critical to sort out, setting up the necessary email accounts with forwarders if necessary, setting up secure access to the administrative panel, which can involved creating or buying an SSL certificate, testing the website operates normally on the live server, ensuring the domains are properly configured, ensuring the software compatibility on the live server and so on.

Site prebuilder hosting is specifically designed for people who'd rather hand these once-off tasks to a professional to take care of because mistakes here can lead to disastrous consequences - such as vulnerability to the Gumblar virus.

Create content & manage website

With a fully operational and tested website on a live and properly configured webserver, you are now at last free to begin doing what you set out to do in the first place. Adding plenty of juicy content (no matter what the goal of your website is) that is genuinely useful to people is one sure fire way of building up a goodly amount of valualbe web traffic.

Remember that getting to this point is only the first step of the journey. Your website will need maintenance and care if it is to maintain a high standard of quality and remain a desireable domain to visit. Over time, your requirements may change and the website will need to change and grow to meet those needs. If you've gone with an open source platform like Drupal or Site prebuilder (based on Drupal) then you're sitting pretty because these excel at scaling and adapting.