Benefits of creating your first website, you may have a small business and looking to expand your business opportunities, or perhaps you would like to keep in contact with your family and share family events and photo's, what better way then to build a website and have it shown on the world wide web.

As a business you will be able to provide your products, services information around the world, if you are only interested in sharing family info, events and photo's to your relations world wide simply create a simple website.

Setting up a website is by far one of the cheapest ways to promoting your business or keeping in contact with your family.

For your business it would be easier and cheaper to have a website, you could continue with your offline promotion.

• Newspaper ads
• Television media
• Leaflet drops
• Bill boards

However I am sure you will agree the costs are expensive.

For Personal - sharing family events you have

• Letters - costs and time to receive or may even get lost.
• Telephones - costly and you can only connect with one family member at a time.
• Facebook - this is free and very good, but with your own website you will have full control of the contents
• Myspace - again similar to facebook.

With your own website you would be able to add events,photo's receive comments and make arrangements all in the privacy of your own website.

Your website will be live on the internet 24/7 365 days a year so if you have a business you can consider your website permanently open even if you decide to take a day off, and the advantage of reaching a much larger audience.

With all that said and done, how do you go about creating/designing a website, surprisingly its not that hard or expensive. First you will need a Domain Name - this is the url that your family or potential customers would put in their browser address bar.

Example http://www.yourname.com

However you need one more thing to actually make your site appear live online, and that is a Hosting Account, A hosting account is where all your files to your website are kept, it may sound complicated if you know nothing about the internet, but I can assure you once you learn the techniques to creating your website you will be pleasantly surprised to find out just how simple it is.

Ok so you know you need a domain name, a hosting account, but how do you create/design a website, believe it or not that is simple to, first you will need a HTML editor, you may have heard of HTML but don't worry with certain editors you only need to know how to type and the best part is there are several free online editors you can use, now there is just one more thing you will need to get your website live on the internet and that is an FTP Client this tool will upload your website contents to your hosting account and again nothing to worry about, they are very simple to use and you can also find free ones online.

So lets recap - You will need

• Domain name - average cost $10 a year
• Hosting Account - average cost $10 a month
• Html editor - free
• FTP Client - Free

Now if you weigh that up with offline costs and that you will get more exposure especially if your website is business orientated, I am sure you will agree that the costs are minimal.