How to create a free website

             Many well-known products/software available in the market are open source software. Open source community is growing at a faster rate. Many coders/programmers contribute their work to the open source community in order to help others and expand their work along with others. Some of the greatly available open source stuff are the Android operating system, Linux OS, MySQL server, Firefox, WordPress and many more. Github is a famous platform to share your work to the open community. WordPress is used to create websites, apps, and blogs. Yes! using WordPress you can create a free website. 

       For most of the websites, the base is a framework. A framework is nothing but a half-built solution for an application. Some of the famous open source frameworks for websites development available are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. They are also known as Content Management System (CMS). Most of the websites you come across daily are built using these three platforms. 

          If you learn the installation of WordPress or Joomla nothing more is needed to build your own website as these frameworks provide almost everything you require to build a customized website. So to create a free website it costs nothing but just your time.

      This post explains how to create a free website using WordPress from scratch. Simply follow these steps and you will have your own website in a few minutes. A person having no knowledge of PHP, CSS, HTML can also follow these steps. You can visit this link to understand what is CSS and how it helps to build web pages. You can also go through the video to have more clarity on the installation.

I will take you through the installation of WordPress

1. Go to http://wordpress.org/download/ Download the latest WordPress files. You would get zip file. Unzip it.
   download wordpress files from wordpress.org website

2. you can try the installation on the local server. In fact, it is the best practice to learn any web application. I would suggest using free software like WampServer, Xampp server for Windows and LAMP for Linux server. These servers support Tomcat, PHP, and MySQL server.
3. Here I am using wampserver for the WordPress setup. Go to http://www.wampserver.com/en/ -> download. Download the latest WampServer and install it.

   Download free wamp server

4. Go to Windows->start->start_WampServer and click on it. This is to start the wampserver on your machine.

   Starting the wampserver

5. You can find the wampserver icon on your taskbar.  Left click on that icon and then click on localhost.  [Alternative way: Open any web browser and type localhost then hit enter. (If you have chosen any port number while installing then include that one in the URL e.g. localhost:8080) ]

   open Localhost on the browser

6. If you get the following default page, it means your WampServer is working properly.

   localhost home page
7. Now you need one database to store the post, comments, user details. So again Left click on  WampServer icon located in the taskbar and click on phpMyAdmin.

   opening phpmyadmin – used for database management

8. Give a name to your database and click on creat a database.

   create a database for file storage

9. Now you need to upload wordpress files to File Manager. www directory acts as a file manager in WampServer.
10. Left click on WampServer icon located in taskbar and click on www_directory and copy your unzipped wordpress files into www [copy whole wordpress folder into www].

    open www – where worfpress files are placed

11. Now you have to enter your database name, database username and database password into the configuration file of WordPress. This step is to connect your WordPress to the database which you have created in step 8.
12. So go to www/wordPress then create a copy of wp-config-sample.php and rename it to wp-config.php and update the details.

    editing wp-Config.php file – changing configurations

13. Now type http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ on any browser and go to Your Project and click on WordPress.
14. Now you will get WordPress welcome page. fill the Site title and other details and click on install WordPress.

    give the title to your website

15. Now Login to your account with the username and password you have chosen and start customizing your website.  You can customize everything  once  you  login.

    Login into your website with admin privileges

Go through this video to understand the process clearly.

      You can download further themes and plugins from http://wordpress.org website. And there are many other sources who provide WordPress themes and plugins you can google and get them. You can also search for terms like  ‘best plugins’ or ‘must have plugins for WordPress’ in google.

            Once you are done with the customization part, you can think of buying a domain and webspace i.e. to make your website online. Some of the well known hosting companies are Bluehost, SiteGround,  Dreamhost many more.

           If you have any doubts or problems you can comment here. If you need any help with customization, updating the design, adding plugins you can comment here. I will reply to you.