v1.1 Website Const. Kit

Websites these days seem so abundant and everyone seems to have one. Whether your doing a website for your family picture album, or designing a website for some product you want to buy, you need the tools. For those of you who know it all, I suggest hitting the back button, this will be extremely boring. This is a guide for n00bs!

First of all the first thing you will need to come up with is obviously an idea. The idea is the most important thing you will need. It will keep you focused throughout your project. Once you have a good idea you will need to create a plan of attack. What I mean by that is, are you wanting your site on a free host? Pay for a domain? Pay for a server? Well I have listed some steps below to getting going.

So you want free hosting huh?
If you are wanting a free host, that's a great way to start. It's how I got my start. In general free hosts will give you space on there webservers for your website, in return they will place ads on your website as a "payback". If you don't care about ads on your site then this is a great way to go. Most people are used to ads by now, so it's not that big of a deal.

The free webhosts that I am familar with are the sites that I used years ago to get my start.

Bravenet.com
Geocities.Yahoo.com
Tripod.Lycos.com

Those are a few golden oldies that have withstood the test of time and are still hosting free sites.

So you want to know what programs to use huh?
If you are going the free hosting route, most of those websites will have what is called a WYSIWYG editor. What that means is "what you see is what you get", in translation means you move the text and images around on your website, then you click post and that's how it looks to everyone else.

If you are wanting to try learning your own HTML there are a few great resources that I used a good 10 years ago to get me going.

HTMLGoodies.com

That site alone got me going and learning the basics and higher functions of websites. Now another thing I used to do was go to Yahoo.com and view the source of the page and look at it to understand how it's setup. If you would like to do this simply click in your browser on View/View Source and that will show you that sites HTML.

Now the programs that are good for you to use to edit with are:

Dreamweaver
Arachnophilia (What i've been using for many years)

These programs are what I like to call "notepad on steroids" they have some hotkeys for tables, images etc. Now that you have your programs and html guide, let's move on to the next section


So you want a dot com huh?
There are great sites that will gladly take your business. I personally switched from Buydomains.com to GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy is pretty easy to use, simply just enter the domain you would like to buy at the top of the page and it will search to see if it has been taken. If not, then you are good to go, simply follow the steps closely.

GoDaddy has offerings for you to join there hosting plan, where they host your .com for a fee. I have never used there hosting packages but I hear they aren't that great. What I suggest doing is going over to webhostingbluebook.com That will give you a list of 10 hosts.

In version 1.1 of this blog I have tried to give you resources to help guide you into making your website, though it was a quick condensed version, feel free to email me at any time and I will be glad to help any n00bs at getting there site going :)

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