Step 1 - Define the purpose of your website.

• What do you wish to accomplish with your site?
• Who will be your "target" audience?
• Will you be selling goods &/or services over the web?

Step 2 - Setup your account. Decide what type of account you will need before you ever sign up. Do you want a Windows or Linux account. If you need help, please give our office a call and we can help you figure out what you need without selling things you don't.

• How many e-mail accounts do you need.
• What type for site are you setting up? Ecommerce? Information Only?

Step 3 - Register a domain if you don't already have one. This process can be done while you are setting up an account using our search engine. Although many good names have been already taken, there is no need to worry. Domains consist of word(s) therefore do some brain storming and ask for ideas. You are bound to come up with something catchy that works well for you. Use your company's name, product or service name.

When registering make ABSOLUTELY sure that the domain is registered under YOUR name. Many web hosting companies will have you pay for the domain registration and register the domain under THEIR name. Later, if you ever want to take your domain somewhere else they will want to charge you an outrageous fee to hand over the domain you thought was yours. Lava Hosting uses your information to register it in your name. We only list yourself as a technical contact so we can make DNS changes for our customers. Our customers can always remove us as technical contact at anytime.

If you have already registered a domain, all you need to do is edit the domain's record to "point" to our servers. Go to the company/website where you registered the domain and edit or modify the record. (You usually get a user/password or it may be done via email or even fax) You want to change the to the following:
Name Server IP Address:
Primary - ns.lavahosting.com - 65.61.180.47
Secondary - ns2.lavahosting.com - 65.61.180.55

Step 4 - Build/Upload your site. Now that you have a domain and an account, you need to add the content to your site.

Get familiar with the web-design software you intend to use

Whether it is FrontPage2000, Dreamweaver, etc. Start getting familiar with the software you intend to use for the design of your website. There is no need to buy all the html books in the store and read them till you are blue in the face. All design programs will insert the correct html for you if you know how to use them.
If all you need is an informational website, take a look at our Site Studio which will allow you to design your site in 30 minutes without HTML knowledge.

Need a custom solution? We can help. Check out our Design services and see what we can do for you.

Publish your site to the web:

Upload your newly designed site to the server. It is a good idea to publish to a different folder such as /test so that you can view your site online and correct any mistakes you might have missed.
Ask people you trust to look up your new site and have them look for errors, positive critique is always good.
Once the final review is ready, go public and publish your new site!