Several businesses, organizations, and individuals are targeting the Internet as a platform where they would want to build a presence. You can have an online identity in form of a website that represents you, your business, or your organization without maxing out your prepaid credit cards. Now the question is about how to get the website built or how to design and build a website yourself. This question can be answered understanding what it takes to build a website.
First of all, you need to understand the purpose of your website because the design of your website needs to suit the purpose of your website. Based on the purpose of your website, you need to know what kind of appearance, images, navigation, and content your website should have. The analyzed set of requirements can take a tangible shape only after it has been coded using a markup language, such as HTML. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which means that it’s a language to write pages a browser can interpret. HTML is required for building the web pages that constitute your website and are viewable on a Web browser.
In addition to HTML, you need to learn a basic scripting language, such as PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) in order to carry out certain server dependent tasks with your website. Whether it’s a dynamic Web page that accepts inputs from users and processes them to store to a database, or an e-commerce based transaction you want your users to be able to perform, you need to code it in a server-side scripting language, such as PHP, Java, ASP.NET or Ruby etc.
There is an endless list of programming tasks you can perform by writing the PHP code. After your website is ready with your HTML code, images, multimedia content, server-side PHP code etc., you need to test your website on a local Web server followed by uploading your entire website to the Web server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).