So You've decided to have an online website for your business. Before doing you will need to follow the following 5 steps in before hosting your website online

1. Design your Website

You will firstly need to design the website for this I would recommend hiring a Web Designer. Before contacting a web designers you should always check the portfolio and there skills. If you just want to advertise your business then you need to look for a web designer who knows how to use graphical programs such as Macromedia dreamweaver, flash, fireworks and Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Imageready, Indesign as well as knowledge of HTML, DHTML, CSS and Javascript. However if you want to sell items online or have some technical calculations etc then you should get a web designer with knowledge of online Databases, PHP, MYSQL, perl, .net , HTML, Javascript and CSS

2. Search for a Domain Name

The Domain name is an important part of your website as this is this web address of your actual website. You need to look for your business name in a domain name but don't sign up to the domain name until you find a suitable hosting company in stage 3

3. Sign Up to a web hosting and domain company

You will now have to sign up to a hosting company which will also register your domain name. Look around and find the cheapest you can find and make sure you check the disk space can fit against your very own website as if your website is over 50 Megabytes (MB) and the hosting company has a hosting package that offers you 25MB disk space then you won't be able to put your website within this hosting package as the disk space is to small. You should also check to see if they can give you a free domain name with this service as well as see whether you get a discount if you pay a year in advance.

4. Upload your website

Now that you have the hosting package you will need to upload the web pages to your website using a file transfer program this you can download for free or web hosting company may offer this to you. They will give you username and passwords wither by email or by post which you need to enter before you transfer the files online and it may take about 24 hours before your website is active so you may have to wait for a little while before you can upload your website to the internet.

5. Advertise Your website

The final step in having a website is advertising your website. This is a very important stage in creating a website as without it you will literally be invisible on the web. You will need to submit your website to search engines and make sure you have appropiate meta tag keywords on your website and within your content as this will attract the search engine to your website. You can exchange your web links with other web sites this is called web exchange and you can buy advertising space with on selected websites.

As you can see you have a lot to think about when putting your website together however if you follow the steps that I have included in this article you should find that having a website is benefical to you and your business.