Build it on your own PC
You may be planning on building a website for personal or business reasons, or maybe you're just interested in how it's done. There are a few ways that you can build your own site, from site building programs to setting up actual web ser environments, on your own computer, without the need for web hosting services. This is ideal for those that want to take the time to learn different types of coding and programming without any expense upfront. Here we show you some of the options you can use for website development on your own computer.
Site Building software
As we mentioned in another section, special website building software programs can be downloaded to your computer so that you can develop your own website. Many of these use "drag and drop" techniques so that you can visually build your pages without knowing any coding. This is an ideal system for many people since it only takes learning the interface of the program and skips learning coding and programming languages. More information can be found in our section on sitebuilders.
Web servers on your PC
A more involved method, and one that advanced web designers and developers use, is setting up an actual web server environment on their PC. Web servers are set up differently than a computer, and require special programs to work the way they do. This is more involved than site building programs, as several programs may need to be installed on the PC and be set up to interact with each other. The advantage of this is that developers can test new sites in an actual web server to see how they will work, and can add more functionality and dynamic elements to their websites than the site building systems will allow.
For example, PHP is a hugely popular scripting language for creating web sites, and if you decide to work with the PHP scripting language, you cannot simply open .php files in a browser and have them work; your PC needs to have Apache and PHP environments set up so that the computer can process the code within the PHP file, and your .php files need to be placed within a certain area of the server environment. Fortunately, several packages are available as downloads that will install all of the server systems required, tie them together, and create an actual server on your PC.
ASP is another popular language for web site building, and is basically a product of Microsoft. ASP development programs can easily be downloaded and installed on your PC, and these programs set up the proper environment for ASP to work so that you can development a site in this language.
The language you want to work with determines the programs you need to install on your PC so that you have the right environment to work in. You'll need to keep in mind that these systems may not be as "user friendly" as site building programs, in that they are not based on "drag and drop" techniques, but require learning the actual coding to make the pages you want. This can be time consiming, but all popular sctiping languages have large user communities on the internet for support, assistance, tutorials and even free scripts that you can implement into the site you want to develop.