The Basics

This lesson gives an overview of the methods that are used in order to build a website. We will also go through the steps involved in making a website go live.

We'll cover the following

Local vs Live

At this point, if you have already built your website then you will definitely be familiar with the term “localhost”. It refers to the standard local IP address of the computer. Localhost (a.k.a Loopback IP address) is generally used to host a website online on the local address 127.0.0.1 that is only accessible on your system. It allows you to test and optimize your website until all the bugs are fixed which gives you the benefit of only paying when you are hundred percent ready to publish your website on a web server.

Methods to build a website

When creating a website, you can use one out these three approaches:

You can either make the website from scratch on a localhost using any web development technology and then:

  1. Buy domain and web hosting service separately
  2. Buy domain and web hosting service together

OR

  1. Buy everything in a bundle by setting up the website using a website builder

For this course, we are assuming that you have implemented everything on your localhost and now you want to shift it to a live server. If that is not the case and you are a beginner who is still trying to figure out how to make a website then we would suggest that you take the pre-requisite of this course Web Development: Everything you need to know before you start!

Now coming back to the topic, the three elements that you will need in order make a website running online are:

  • Domain Name
  • DNS
  • Web Hosting Service

Don’t worry if you are not familiar with these, we will cover them in the coming lesson!

Steps to Launch Your Website

Given below is a list of steps that you’d need to do in order to make your website live:

  • Register Domain Name
  • Find a Web Hosting Service
  • Deploy your website
  • Testing & Maintenance
  • SEO & Web Analytics

We will be discussing each of these steps in detail in the later chapters!

Test your knowledge!

1

The difference between a local and live server is that the local server is set up on you computer where as the live server is set up one someone else computer. Is thi statement true of false?

A)

True

B)

False

Question 1 of 20 attempted

In the next lesson, we will look at the elements needed in order to run a website successfully.