Getting Started: Your First Website

You don’t need an account, an app, or any special software to make a webpage. A text editor and a browser are enough. Here’s the short version, start to finish.

Write the page

Make a new folder anywhere on your computer, and inside it a file named index.html. Open it in any plain text editor (Notepad works, though something like VS Code makes it easier) and type this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>My First Page</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Hello, world</h1>
</body>
</html>

Save the file. That’s a complete, valid webpage.

Preview it

Find index.html in your file browser and double-click it. It opens directly in your default browser, no server required. Edit the file, save, and reload the browser tab to see the change. This is how you’ll work the whole way through.

Style it

Add a second file in the same folder, style.css, and link it from the head of your HTML:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">

Anything you write in style.css now controls how the page looks. The HTML basics and CSS basics guides cover what to put in each file.

Put it online

A page on your own computer is only visible to you. To give it a real address, you need somewhere to host the files. Which host makes sense depends on what you’re building:

A personal homepage, blog, or just messing around: Neocities is free, built specifically for pages like this, and has an old-web, DIY feel to it.
A project already sitting in a GitHub repository: GitHub Pages is free and deploys straight from the repo, no separate upload step. The Git and GitHub basics guide covers getting a project onto GitHub in the first place.
A site that might grow (contact forms, redirects, more traffic): Netlify or Cloudflare Pages both have a free tier and handle those extras without much setup.

The general process is the same everywhere: create an account, upload or connect your files, and the host gives you a working URL.

Use your own domain (optional)

The free URL a host gives you will look like yourname.github.io or similar. If you want something like yourname.com instead, a few registrars are known for being straightforward and reasonably priced, without the renewal-price surprises some bigger-name registrars are known for: Namecheap, Porkbun, and Cloudflare Registrar (sold at cost, no markup) are all solid picks. Buy the domain, then point it at your host following whatever instructions that host provides. This step is optional. Plenty of personal sites run happily on the free address.

From here, the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript guides go deeper into what you can actually build.

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