Frontpage Hosting

The first step in creating a webpage is to find a company that can host your site. The easiest way to think of this process is with a physical analogy: if you want to start a business in a town, you have to first buy or lease the property on which the business will be located. In the same way, a hosting service can provide you with electronic real estate needed to start your webpage.

Again, as with a physical business, the first thing your electronic real estate needs is an address, or URL. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is simply a string of letters and numbers that designates the specific space that your business occupies. For example, if your business is named "Mike's Pet Emporium," your URL might be "http://www.mikespetemporium.com." That's assuming that there aren't any other Mike's Pet Emporiums in our electronic neighborhood!

So where can someone get this type of address and the electronic real estate that accompanies it? An internet service provider, or ISP, should do the trick. ISPs are companies with large banks of computer servers, which make money by leasing out their electronic space. To continue our analogy, it might be easiest to think of them as electronic landlords or property owners.

Another hosting option is a Web Presence Provider (WPP), which basically provides you with the same internet presence as an ISP provider would. Then, once you've got your property, you're ready to build. A webpage authoring program such as Microsoft FrontPage allows you to transform your plot of bare ground into a bustling business.