Advice on how to establish a website?

This vague anxiety has finally built to the point where I feel like I ought to do something about it-- or at least start thinking about gathering information regarding the specifics of making plans about doing something about it. As everyone knows, it is rapidly becoming impossible to reflect visible light or affect matter without the aid of a personal website. I reckon it’s past time I tried getting my feet wet, by attempting to establish some sort of humbly scaled online presence to more efficiently repulse people.

How would one go about setting up a modest personal website for displaying hamfisted attempts at creative expression such as stories, illustrations, possibly an ongoing comic strip, or suchlike? Is there a way to do this on the cheap? How do you register a domain name, and is there a best procedure for determining whether one’s naming ideas are currently available? Software? Hardware? Legal niceties? Blood sacrifice?

As you may infer from the tone of my questioning, I am stone ignorant of the computer machine network and all its ways. I just see other people maintaining keen little websites with entertaining content and zippy names, and I think, “Hey! I’d like to be doing something like that!” No idea if this is even realistic for me or not, but then at one point in my life I didn’t think I could earn a living either. Yet today I’m a respected professional troglodyte.

So I require an extremely basic tutorial on such matters, phrased in simple, guttural protolangauge, at the level of someone who doesn’t know what ‘HTML’ stands for. I’d be grateful if someone could point out a walkthrough for the roaringly ignorant, especially one that doesn’t unduly dwell on the fact that its target audience is roaringly ignorant. My rice cake-brittle self-esteem has enough survival challenges on a daily basis without being forced to consult “Website Design for Retarded Assholes!” from the "Retarded Assholes!"series of self-help books.

I figure there’s been threads like this before, but I have no idea what the expiration rate is on useful information for this subject. If there’s other threads that are still timely, please let me know. Any relevant experiences or sources of instruction are welcomed. Thanks muchly for your attention.

There are 8 billion domain registration sites and they all allow a free availability search on names. I used moniker.com as it was highly recommended, not by friends, but by webmasters. They all said it was best NOT to have the same business registering your domain and hosting your site.

They all run about $10/year. If you’re honestly stone ignorant about it and starting from scratch you ought to just pay someone to do it.

Oh…then you’ll probably want to avoid Web Publishing For Smelly, Impotent Pedophiles as well…

It is pretty easy.

  1. Find a domain name you like that is available (start at step 2 for this).

  2. Find a hosting service and a domain registrar. They may be the same. I have my own web site but I want to move it soon. I hear universal good things about www.godaddy.com

  3. Register and pay for the whole thing. It really doesn’t cost much. It may cost less than $60 a year all inclusive and less after the first year.

  4. The hosting company should give you a point and click interface you can use to build your website and lots of other nifty tools to post everything from photos to creating your own message board. Figure two hours to get your initial presence known.

This stuff isn’t that difficult. If you found a way to get most of your clothes on, find your computer, and somehow navigate to here to post this, you can have your own web site tonight if you want.

Sounds like you are not in the “making things from scratch” department just yet, and would probably benefit from starting a blog for your web exploits, rather than going the full-blown domain name and website route, which you can perhaps head towards later when you think the effort is worth it.

I recommend you begin here, and choose from an already-hosted Blog site like Blogger or Typepad or something else (as long as it is NOT MySpace).

“How would one go about setting up a modest personal website for displaying hamfisted attempts at creative expression such as stories, illustrations, possibly an ongoing comic strip, or suchlike? Is there a way to do this on the cheap?”

Blogger and Wordpress are free. Can’t get any cheaper than that. I strongly, strongly recommend Wordpress. Blogger has a reputation for not being very user friendly, and is down sometimes (you’d think Google, which owns it now, would have solved these problems. They haven’t.)

With Wordpress, you can make each of your stories a separate post, then put a permanent link to them on your main page. This will get your feet wet, at no cost, and you can decide where you want to go from there.

If you decide to dig into it further, come back and ask again.

If you want to explore further, I recommend using GoDaddy to research domain names and to buy what you want (I use it for my various domain names). Eight bucks a year is cheap.

As for site hosting, they can either set you up with a limited Web site, or, if you are confident enough to go independent, you can find a hosting service that offers discount rates. I’ve been with Host Magik for several years for several years and recommend them (no, I don’t get a kickback for the refer), but there have been several threads here with praise for other hosting services. A look at their site will show you what you get for $7.50 a month.

As for software, I use Pmachine’s Expression Engine Core. It’s free and gives me all the tools I need to build my pages. Caution: familiarity with HTML, CSS and databases needed.

If you want to see what I do with it, click on my sig. I’m an amateur at this, but I’m proud of what I’ve been able to put up.

Thanks for the heads-up on that. I find it both funny and disturbing that my paranoia has been independently verified.

“No, Terrifel, it’s not just your imagination; authors of self-help books really do hate you.”

I actually recommend Textpattern over Wordpress :wink:
I researched them both and think Textpattern is the more flexible of the two, and it is what I’m currently running my site with. But the two are very similar, it’s not like one sucks and the other is pure gold or anything. It has a super simple interface for installing plugins for additional features, too. Plugins are just text files and you copy/paste them into a box on your web-based interface and click a button. Pretty simple. I’m teaching my cat how to do it so that I can be lazier.

:slight_smile:

I hadn’t heard of Textpattern; that’s interesting, OpalCat. Just like pmachine doesn’t show up on the radar of content-management programs.

Textpattern straddles the line between content management and blogging software. It’s extremely yay.

I work for a hosting company… er, so I’d feel actually rather bad about plugging them on here. I think there’s probably some kind of SDMB rule against it. :smiley:

Registering a domain name is really very easy once you know what you want. Biff bam.

There’s all sorts of template software out there for making your websites. Ask the salesperson for whatever hosting provider you want to use about the individual programs you intend to use. They may also have suggestions as to what programs you might find better.

I know my company has all its employees under one roof. I could, from my desk, bean every member of the sales department with my stress ball. A few steps down the hall and I could do the same to the tech support department, plus the Vice President. :smiley: I think it’s a good way to do business. We’re a little pricier than some, partly because of that, partly because we have bigger plans than most other companies, sometimes by a factor of 10.

I’d really suggest getting your feet wet with something like DeviantArt or a heftier blog if you’re not going to be doing ecommerce or something similar.

Step one: Decide if you want your own domain name (e.g., terrifel.com or some such.)

If you do, you need to register it (there’s a whole system in place to assure that you don’t end up with the two sites with exactly the same address). While there are in fact at least 8 billion companies that will register your domain name, not all of them are official internet registrars. If a company advertising to register a domain name for you is not on this list, then they are a middleman who will have to go through one of the companies on the list to actually register your name, and it’s possible you may end up paying more. The two biggest official registrars in the US are Network Solutions (who, once upon a time had a monopoly on name registration, but act much better now) and GoDaddy (with whom I just recently had a superb customer service experience).

When thinking about your website domain name, think about what you want it to end with (.com or otherwise). Here are your current options (not all may be available to you). If a .com name you want is taken, you may be able to register a similar name (terrifel.info, for example).

Step two: Find some webspace.

This is merely disk space on a machine with a hell of lot of fast telecommunication lines and a program called a Web Server. These can be expensive to buy, set up and maintain as an individual, so you will probably be renting space on some other machine somewhere. These are owned by companies that offer “hosting” services, and may be the same company you registered your domain name with.

If you don’t care about your domain name, your ISP may already have some webspace for you, but the web address of the page may be something like www.niftymail.com/members/pages/~terrifel. If this is cool with you, getting space may be as simple as e-mailing your ISP and asking how to make use of it. For example, each e-mail address on my Earthlink account has 10MB of webspace available at no extra charge. If you plan on having lots and lots of high-detail images or media on your site, you may need tens or possibly even a couple hundred Megabytes of space. Otherwise, you don’t need very much.

At some point during arranging for hosting you may be asked if you want a Windows Server or a Linux Server. About 90% of the web is on Linux servers, but if you think you might ever want to run Active Server Pages (.asp or .aspx) you will need a Windows server. Otherwise just say Linux.

Step three. Create some pages.

Sometimes whoever is hosting your files also provides a fairly simple sitebuilder tool that takes a lot of the guess work out of page creation. These can range from decent to horrific. If you would like to build your own site, a fairly recent free option is Mozilla’s SeaMonkey package, which combines a browser, e-mail program and web page composer tool into one (based around the concept of the old Netscape Communicator package). More expensive options include professional stalwart Adobe Dreamweaver ($400 dollars from Adobe, or half that if you can document that you are a student or teacher) and brand new Microsoft Expression.

You may wish to learn some HTML along the way, which isn’t very hard. the tutorial at w3schools is as good as any.

Step four: Put your files on your hosting server.

This can be as simple as going to the hosting computer’s site and browsing to a folder on your computer, or as complex as getting a hold of an FTP client program to DIY. If you are not comfortable with computers, keep this consideration in mind when choosing a host.

Step five: Get people to come to your site.

Spam your friends and family with your new site address. To get on Google, get other people with webistes to link to yours. If you are linked to, Google will eventually find you.

Network Solutions is both the most expensive and most irritating of the registrars in existence. I know several people who use GoDaddy with good results. I use a company out of France called Gandi.net but they charge in Euros and at the moment it’s not a super good bargain because of the euro/dollar values.

I use Wordpress (which takes some time to set up if you’re not at all HTML-savvy, but I guess since I managed to do it in the end, so can you). But in theory it is highly customizable (if you’re able to, I never really managed to change my template…) as opposed to using Blogger or a similar service. If you’re using Word Press in a blog type fashion, I also recommend installing Spam Karma to keep viagra-hawking people from spamming your comments section.

But I’ve really come here to plug my hosting service, A Small Orange. It was recommended to me by someone on this board and I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them: If there’s a problem, they fix it immediately (once literally within seconds!), they help you setting up things and seem to be generally nice people.

Textpattern has several anti-spam plugins that you can use as well. I hate comment spammers!!