In today's market few companies can do without a website. Also private web pages are common, allowing people to blog, share family photos, opinions and help each other out with ideas or concepts.
What to do, if I want a web page
Envision what you need to do with your web page. Is it going to be a simple business card, where your clients can go and fetch your phone number. Do you need an online gallery for displaying your family photos? Do you need the web page to be easily maintainable? How many pages should be on your website? Should users be able to leave a comment?
The answers to these questions will lead you on the way. You want to know if you need a simple static web page, that rarely gets updates. If you need an easily maintable site with regular updates, or if you simply want a weblog.
The static web page
If the purpose of your web page is simply to put an interactive business card online for customers, or friends and colleagues to find you, you might want to dig in to HTML programming, or use one of the many WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get) out there. Popular WYSIWYG editors are Microsfot Frontpage, or Adobe Dreamweaver.
The WYSIWYG editors can help you set up a static web page, that is somewhat maintainable. When you have done your editing, you need to upload your changes to a web server.
The dynamic web page with regular updates
If you run a professional business, you will want to be able to update your web page on the fly in a few minutes. You might also want to post news or calendar items to your web page.
In this case you need a Content Management System (CMS) for your website. The content management system will give you a web-based backend interface which you log in to, and it let's you change content and create new pages on your website without any delays. You write your content into a dynamic database already on the web, and the web server generates your web pages on request.
A content management system allows you to quickly and efficiently update content, without having to manually build or upload HTML data to the web server. The web server software simply takes care of the hard work for you.
A good content management system is an upfront investment, that will quickly save you money, by minimizing the webmaster workload. Also by buying a content management system, from a web design and programming company, you can make sure that usability needs and web design is done professionally and the basics are in place.
If you want professional dynamic features like automatically updated news list, RSS feeds and web 2.0 features - the content management system software is THE way to go.
Personal blogging software is what I need
Here you can choose to hook up with one of the blogging providers, that offer ready made blogs. Some of these are free, some cost a little money.
You can also choose to set up an open source solution like Wordpress on your own web server. This is a popular solution to getting a web page, chosen by users who want some control over their content, and are semi-skilled with programming and web servers.
Web page as online business that blogs
There are examples of small businesses that set up their web pages as blogs, allowing them to go into personal dialogue with clients and stakeholders directly on their web page.
If you are a newly started internet business, this might be the way to go. It is a flexible solution that allows you to actively communicate with your future customers.