Step 1: Reserve a virtual space for your website

Useful terms: "IP address," "domain name," and "web host."

Every website has an address with two components: a numerical address called an IP address, and a domain name.

An Internet Protocol (IP) address, simply put, is a number that uniquely identifies a computer, including the web host — the actual computer that serves your web files to visitors. This web host may contain one or several websites with different domain names, but all of them would point to the same IP address. A typical IP address has four sets of numbers, each between 0 and 255, separated by periods, like this: 143.263.138.7. When you set up a website, you can learn what your web host's IP address is from your service provider.

A domain name is the mnemonically simple name of your site. For instance, the domain name of the Creative Capital website is "creative-capital.org." When a web browser tries to contact a domain, the name is automatically interpreted as the correct directory on the web host.

Building a home for your pages

Analagous to renting or owning your own dwelling, you can decide to rent space in someone else's web host, or to host your own site.

Three options:

• Basic: You can rent space on a web host, who will assign you a directory on their domain.

• Medium: You can rent space on a web host and use your own domain name for an additional fee. This will allow people to access your website at www.yourname.com, and will also give you email addresses in the format name@yourname.com. The suffixes ".org" or ".net" are also available, if you prefer.

• Full: For people who wish to host multiple sites or store large amounts of data, it is possible to have a dedicated server at your disposal, one that is not shared with other users. This requires some background running servers, and familiarity with UNIX operating language, and is outside the scope of a primer like this.

If you subscribe to email from one of the major service providers (AOL, Earthlink, etc.), you probably already have some space allotted for your use. By following some simple instructions from your service provider, you can quickly set up a website there with text pages, some graphics, and possibly some simple multimedia. If this is not the case, a simple web search will turn up other web hosts who will provide space on their servers for a small monthly fee.

A personalized domain name can be reserved through Network Solutions, or through another service provider. Follow their directions to reserve your domain name and point it to the appropriate IP address.

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