Originally posted by Beakybird:
Thank you for all the helpful replies! It still seems like doing it myself is a bit daunting.
OK, so if I have a domain and a host, what is it that I need next? Is it a service or software? Do I have to buy another service to help me design a website or do I have to purchase software to do it? Is there anything else I need?
Thank you,
Beakybird
Hi Beaky,
glad to see you're interested in putting your site together. I prvide a little hosting myself, I have two servers, a linux and a windows server, so if you (or anyone else here) ever have any serious problems, feel free to contact me at markus(a)thibros.com. I'm much better at this stuff than with my PSR3K, which I just got last Friday.
First you have to find out what your options on your hosting are. There are two ways: you create your site at home and transfer later to godaddy, or you do everything "online" on a webpage. Probably you'll do the former.
You can create the site with any program starting notepad, Word, Frontpage, up to dreamweaver. The difference is that the bigger programs let you do fancy stuff and customizations, which are much more diffucult in the other programs to realize. But actually almost any program that suits you and your budget will be fine. I suggest to start low budget, look for a free tool, or use Word (and save as html-file).
The most common way to put your site to into the internet onto the server (upload) is so-called ftp. Many web-creation programs have ftp built it, there are free tools for it, even windows explorer has it. You need to know three things: your username, password and server (which is probably something like ftp.larry123.com, you probably got this information with your hosting).
If you use ftp with windows explorer, you type into the address bar:
ftp://username: password@ftp.larry123.com
or whatever your ftp server is. Then you see the files on the server, and can drag and drop your html files (those are the actual text files), images and music. Just put the whole folder where you saved your stuff with all subdirectories up there. The better web creation programs do this automatically with a button press, but you still have to supply your username, password and server somewhere in the program.
I recommend creating a little page just saying "This site will come to you soon" with maybe a picture under it, and uploading it. Then check your
http://www.larry123.com in your browser, but maybe you'd have to press refresh, if the old page still shows.
Start with Word and a few little free programs to do this. Try more than one, if you can. Many commercial ones have a free trial. Nothing is more frustrating than creating a big site, and then finding out that another program is much more comfortable, and makes you start all over again.
I'd give you suggestions of free and affordable web creation programs, but I'm on my way to London, can't really look into it now. What you need is probably a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get), so you don't have to bother with the html language. There's a small list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors or search for "html editors comparison" in google. Many shareware/freeware sites have them too.
Once you have put anything onto your site, you can do the next step and think about what you want to put there.
Btw, I usually use a "content management system", which means I put a generic site once onto the server, and then update my information directly in the browser through a login page from anywhere. So I don't need any tools for that. I use Joomla, which is free, put your hosting needs to provide php and mysql for this. But don't worry about this yet, that's somthing to keep in mind regarding the future.
Good luck,
Markus
[This message has been edited by Haku (edited 12-11-2006).]
[This message has been edited by Haku (edited 12-11-2006).]