Step 1 : Select your platform

Go through your requirements & just think about how your website is going to built, audience, functionality & other constraints. Analyze it carefully, Because you cant switch your platforms often. If you are not good in there, please contact some experts in those areas.

Free Opensource Platforms to build your website

1. Joomla – Biggest CMS platform, Mostly used

2. Drupal – This is also a great CMS, more number of people are using it

3. WordPress ( Blog & Basic CMS ) – You couldnt expect more features as what Joomla or Drupal is having. It is perfect choice for small content oriented websites.

Step 2 : Design your website

Contact some very good web designer to build your website based on your requirements & taste. If you are the designer, thats cool 🙂
Step 3 : Install & configure your website with platform

You can start installing & integrating Joomla / Drupal / WordPress. Once you done with installing do the custom design integration or make changes whatever you want. Its better to playaround with some good developer.

Step 4 : Hosting solution

The above platforms are free open source.

So you have to spend $$$ for few things

1. Domain name – Register your domain in either godaddy or anywhere

2. Hosting – You have to launch your application. Shared hosting starts from $3 – $10 – …. I suggest that for websites, its good to go with servage.net or lunarpages.com or 1and1.com

3. Ask your developer to setup everything

Step 5 : You have website

Now you have website 🙂