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Recommendations for building web sites
There are thee major components to creating your own website: content,
hosting, and naming. You will have several options in each of these
areas, and your choice will affect the appearance and cost of your
site. If you want your own domain name (e.g. something like
sitename.com, or familyname.us) and your site will not get major
traffic (most personal sites will not unless you post big files), then
the simplest and least expensive option is to go with Directnic. If you don't
need your own name and can tolerate long URL's like
http://www.yourisp.net/~yourusername/pagename.html, then check with
your ISP as they may already provide you with space for your web site.
All of these options are discussed below.
Hosting
You will need a place to store your web page. You will want this
computer where your web pages will be stored to be always on and
reachable by others on the internet. Unless you really know what you
are doing, leave your own computer on all the time, and it is always
connected to the network through a high speed connection, you will
want to "host" your site on a commercial hosting provider.
This hosting service may already be provided by your internet service
provider (e.g. America Online, Earthlink, MSN, etc) as part of your
service. If you prefer not to use your ISP for hosting, you can also
use one of many free or low cost hosting services like Geocities (part
of Yahoo!). There are a lot of other companies providing this kind of
service, including many of the domain name registrars (described
later). Such web hosting providers will allow you to host your site,
but they may add advertising content, so that whenver someone visits a
page on your web site, they see advertising added to you pages by the
web hosting provider. These services will also allow you to host your
site without advertising, but they charge you for this option.
My advice is that if you are just starting out, read the documentation
provided by your ISP to see if they offer space to host your web site,
and if so, start out there. If your site is small and only has a
small number of users, this option may allow you to host your site
without added advertising, and without paying anything more than you
already pay to connect to the Internet. If you want, you can then add
your own domain name, arranged through your ISP for a fee, or register
a domain name for $15 per year from Directnic and redirect to
the site hosted by your ISP.
Domain name registration
-
Directnic - Register
domain names for $15 per year and get several options for hosting your
site. I find the DirecNic interfaces to be easy to use and DirectNic
provides some of the best free or low-cost options for hosting
personal, low traffic sites (as of January 2004, I was able to get a
year of bannerless hosting plus the cost of domain registration for a
total $30). They will also provide free email forwarding from your
new domain.
Hosting oprions for your website
- Directnic - If you
went with DirecNic for your domain name, then choose one of their
hosting options. You you can redirect your domain to another web
site, perhaps hosted by your ISP. This last option allows you to use
your new domain name with an existing hosting service that might be
included in your monthly internet access charges, and if your ISP
doesn't add banners to your pages, it allows you to use your new
domain name for a bannerless site without paying extra.
Alternatively, with your domain registration through DirectNic, select
free hosting with banners or for for $15 per year more they will host
your site without banners, up to 2 Gigabytes of data transfer (unless
you post big files like mp3s, most personal sites fit easily within
this limit).
- GeoCities, part of the
Yahoo network, will host your site for free, though with the free
service your URL will show a GeoCities server. You can pay to get
your own second level domain (e.g. user.com). If you plan to join any
affiliate programs, a significant drawback to GeoCities is that their
terms of service for their free hosting specifically prohibits such
affiliate links except to sites participating in GeoCities own
affiliate network. A second downside to GeoCities is that they insert
advertising banners on your site. Geocities offers paid hosting
options that eliminate the advertising. These options are more
expensive for low traffic sites than is the bannerless hosting offered
by DirectNic, but less expensive if you get several gigabytes of
traffic per month.
- www.addr.com, provides fairly
inexpensive hosting high end management tools and site options, and
does not insert their own advertising on your site. For their low end
offering, you can expect to pay about $120 per year to host your site
here. If your site will have higher volume than most personal sites,
you should at least consider this option. If you are just starting
out, the lower cost options already described are probably better
suited to your needs.
Content
Once you have established and hosted your web site it is time to
create the pages that will be displayed. Many hosting services
provide tools for creating an initial web site. Some offer to create
you initial site for a fee, some allow you to subscribe to use special
sitebuilding software, and almost all allow you to upload your own
HTML pages. Read the documentation available from your hosting
service to see what tools are available and can be used with their
system.
If your needs are real simple, you can create the site yourself using
HTML, HyperText Markup Language, the language for describing web
pages. You can also use a web page editor like Microsoft FrontPage.
(part of some versions of Microsoft office). If you don't have
FrontPage or another HTML editor, or for some other reason choose to
write the HTML code for your site by hand, you can find many guides on
the web to learn how to write HTML. If you can tolerate lots of pop
up ads and distracting banners, one such guide can be found here.
If creating the site yourself you will create the pages on your own
machine and upload them to the server following instructions provided
by the hosting service, or you might write the pages through a web
interface provided by the service. Almost all hosting service provide
guides to help you create and upload content to your site.
The following are for more advanced users
Affiliate Networks
There are three major affiliate networks, each of which supports a
different set of merchants. You can join multiple networks. To be
effective, the merchants you promote should be related to the content
of your site, and they should be merchants you trust. Remember, you
are recommending these sites and mechants. If you wouldn't use them
yourself, don't recommend them to others. On several occasions I have
dropped merchants from my site when I found the quality of service
dropped to a point that I was no longer willing to use the services of
the company myself.
The three major affiliate networks are:
Search engine listings
HOME,
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RECOMMENDATIONS(
BOOKS,
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SITEBUILD,
FREE
)