How to Design a Website

So how do you find the right one?  Well there are some guidelines and then it comes down to the one thing which needs to be there for any purchase or supplier selection you make, a good reputation

Selection Process

There are two key questions that will help narrow the field of your selection, they are:

1/ What features do you need?

2/ How big (mb) will your website be?

We will go through these two questions in turn.

What features do you need?

When you first start your website you may think that you only need the basics, just working in straight html, linking a few pages together.  I can guarantee that it won’t stay like that for long, even if you are only designing a website as a hobby. You will soon want to be adding forms, scripts for tracking guests so you can see how they found your site etc.  These are just two very basic functions that you will add immediatley and as you get into your website development more you will add more features for your visitors because you will want your site to be the best and most importantly, the most functional for your visitors.

Basic Features

With any free hosting plan you should expect to get at least

 - 25mb of disk space
 - 1GB of monthly transfer
 - ftp access
 - technical support by email
 - perl support
 - single email address

This will be enough to get you started with a very basic site but you will probably have banners on every page from the hosting company. Pretty soon you will find you need more space, more features and you want to have the banner adverts removed, even if it is so you can put your own on!


Enhanced Features

So when you start to pay for hosting you get more features and these should be enough to satisfy any part time webmaster or hobbyist. Web hosting has become a very competitive industry, partly because the technology has made it accessesible to so many companies, telecommunication companies have allowed more parts of the world to have high speed internet access (at least 2mb upload) and a major factor now is that many people are doing their own web hosting at home on second hand PCs!

With only paying about £25 per year you can get

 - 500mb of disk space
 - 10GB of monthly transfer
 - Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Extensions
 - PHP support
 - Perl support
 - Server Side Includes (SSI)
 - .htaccess Passwords
 - Custom Error Pages

With this type of hosting you can build a reasonable website in html and PHP and utilise the features to give your website true functionality.  There may be some restrictions you will face such as multimedia but you can find hosting plans at this level which will allow this.


Advanced Features

Now we are at the level where all possible features should be available so that a website can be designed and operated that comprises of any aspect of web design.

With the high level of hosting plans it is scripting support, ASP & PHP, that is critical and disk space.  With these two factors experienced web designers can create database structured websites that can be maintained with minimal effort and can be easily tailored to meet changing needs of visitors of the company displaying the website.


It may be that you already know the features and amount of disk space you need, if so you have an easy choice. However, even if you are still unsure, the best hosting plans will allow you to upgrade to increased disk space and the higher level features as and when you need them at a reasonable price.