By David Higgins

If you have ever wanted to pursue your own business or even just put your thoughts out to the world, creating your own website is a must.  Putting content on a website for the world to see is a great way to get the opinion of the masses.  If your business website gets a good reaction, the business idea may be sound.  If your personal website gets a lot of traffic, you could consider your content to be worthy.

Although most people nowadays are quite computer savvy, building a website from scratch is not everyone’s cup of tea.  A lot of people will simply hire a web designer to execute their vision.  However, most web designers can be quite pricey, so if you are lacking the funds to hire someone, a perfect option is to create a free blog.

One of the more popular online blogging services is “Blogger”. Blogger allows you to create a free blog with an interface that is very user friendly for those of you who are not familiar with coding or building websites.  Your only job is to add your written content and any media you would like on your site.  Voila!  You will have a website to call your very own. The only downside to using one of the free blogging websites is that you won’t have an easy website address like www.yourawesomeidea.com to tell all your friends. When you use Blogger your website address will be something like www.yourawesomewebsite.blogspot.jp, which is a mouthful to say and remember.

Most people who have any sort of computer savvy will register their own domain name.  In order to register your own domain name, first you have to see if someone else has already taken the name.  If it’s available, you can register it, and you will have the rights to that name.  The price for registering a domain is quite reasonable and ranges from US$10-30 for one year.

Loren Runcie of Teleport Web (www.teleport.net) is a person on Okinawa who can help you to create just the kind of website you want and need.

However, registering your domain name is only the first step.  Once you have a domain name, you will need to “host” it.  This is because all your data needs to be stored somewhere.  Hosting one domain name for a year costs roughly US$100.  Depending on where you bought your domain name from, it can be very tedious to connect your domain name and hosting account if you use separate companies. Therefore, it is best to buy your domain name and hosting account from the same company.   One of the companies I recommend is www.godaddy.com, however, you may want to shop around as there are other companies that may offer more competitive prices.

Once you have registered your domain name and obtained a hosting account, your next step is to build your website with a website design.  As stated earlier, you can either hire a web designer or try to design it on your own.  If you are computer savvy or don’t mind venturing into unknown and sometimes frustrating territory, you can try adding a website theme company such as WordPress to your hosting account.

WordPress has tons of free themes that you can use and create a pretty fancy website, but the types of websites on offer only go so far.  If you feel your site needs more customization than you can handle yourself, you are going to need a web designer.

One great web designer on Okinawa is Loren Runcie. Loren is a web developer at his company Teleport Web (http://teleportweb.net).  A recent example of his work is the free classified site on Okinawa called Connect Okinawa (www.connectokinawa.com).  His degree in Computer Science allowed him to gain the skills to produce computer wizardry.  Loren says, “I love web design and programming, mostly because it offers me a chance to interact with real people, and help them turn their ideas into something tangible, and hopefully impressive. In the process, my craft and skill set has developed as well.”

So whether you choose to make a simple blog or dive into a website with a customized name of its own, it cannot be stressed enough that creating a website is a one of the best ways to get your message and ideas out to the world from the comfort of your own home. Although there is a learning curve when jumping into the website world, you will easily reap the benefits faster than if you tried to spread your word any other way.

Loren Runcie

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