What you need to know before you own or create a blog or website

Having a website is a big step especially when you want to give your business an online presence. Though people create websites for different purposes, whatever the reason of creating a website is, there are things you need to know on how to maintain the website, add functionalities to the website and also making it achieve the purpose for which it was created.
I will be discussing these tips under three categories such as:
1.       Before Creation of the website
2.       Maintenance of the website
3.       Aftermath of the website creation

1.       Before creating the blog/website: There are so many things you need to know before you own a website.
·         Pay to get it online: You need to pay money to get your website online and you have to keep paying this money continuously for as long as you want the website to stay online.  Money is paid in order to Host the website, the hosting simply refers to making your website accessible to other people through their devices. The company that will connect your website to the internet so as to be accessible to others is called a Web Host. They are the ones that you will pay them to keep your website online. This payment of the Web host could be yearly, Monthly or Multiples of years or months. Whatever is the case, if the time of payment elapsed, you have to renew your hosting service or else your website will be deleted from their computers (Servers).
You also need to keep paying money in order to get a domain name. A domain name is the name that people type into the address bar of the browser in order to get to your website.  The company that gives you this name is called a Domain registrar. All computers on the internet are given a number known as Internet Protocol (IP) Address. Your Phone, Computer, Ipad, or anything you use to connect to the internet must have an IP address. This IP address helps to identify your device. Since the website just comprises of files, these files are stored in the computer that your web host assigns to you. The computer that your website files are hosted on is called a SERVER and it has an IP address. This number could be in the format:   127.0.0.1. So imagine that you have to type these type of numbers every time you want to visit a website. Because of this complexity of number and for the sake of making it easier to remember, you must give your website a domain name. It should be easier to remember than those numbers. That is the reason why you need a domain name. For you to continuously use this name, you have to keep renewing it just like that of the web Hosting.
So before getting a website, you should know that you are going to keep paying for the domain name and also for the hosting.
·         Pay to create the website or blog:
This may not apply to most people since some can create the websites by themselves and with the advent of free blogging websites like Blogger.com. Wordpress.com, Hubpages etc. But the disadvantage of having everything free is that your website will not look professional and for that, you keep losing customers. And another serious disadvantage is that, anytime you go against the Terms and Conditions of such websites, they will delete your website without your consent and you have nothing to do about it. Blogger.com is fond of doing this, so if you do not want your website that you might take years to build to be deleted in one day, just find a programmer and pay to create one for you. By paying them, you can customize your website the way you like.
2.       Maintenance of the website: After your website is created, you need to do a lot of work on it in order to make it more profitable, and prevent it from hackers, spam bots and other robots.
Websites are exposed to robots; these robots are Softwares that keep coming to your website making it look as if you have visitors. They have different purposes; some robots come for email addresses written on your website. It is good if you do not expose the email addresses of users on your website because these robots will copy them and keep sending spam messages to these email addresses. Other robots look for some installed programs on your website such as wordpress,  Ckeditors, Blogs, HtmlPurifiers, Joomla, Drupal, etc. Their aims are to check for some errors in these programs in order to launch an attack on the website that has these programs installed. It is because of this reason that websites using these are advise to immediately upgrade to the latest version of these programs because once a security hole has been detected, a new version is released in order to block that security hole.
In order to block these robots, you need a computer programmer who is vast in Apache servers. Though there are other ways of doing this, it is best done using Apache. Whatever the case may be, you must block these robots to make your website safe, and also to reduce the load on your server.
Sometimes, unexpected things could happen in the course of using the website, you need a programmer to make repairs or amend some unexpected events.
In general, you need a programmer to maintain your website for you. Be prepared to have a programmer to maintain the website for you.
3.       Aftermath of the website creation: after you create a website and you have made room for maintenance, you need to start getting awareness and creating a market for your website product.
Awareness comes in different forms, but the easy and stress less way of getting users and awareness is by Search engines such as Google, Bing, Aol etc. In order to get search engines to drive users (Traffic) to your website, you need to make it easily accessible to search bots and also to optimize it. Optimization can be done by the owner of the website or by Search Engine Optimization expert. You can get one to help you with it. The good thing about search engines traffic is that once you have written it, you do not need to keep sharing it to people on social media before you drive traffic but your traffic keeps coming even when you are sleeping.
You also need to keep to the trends of events occurring on the web such as social medial share buttons and many more. When a new technology comes up, you need to be updated so that you could quickly use it for your advantage.
Hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs are created everyday but they barely live for one year because of the challenges involved in creating a blog which were not considered.  It is good if you know the nature of everything first before you go into it. Websites are not as easy to create and maintain as you may think unless you are a programmer.