How do you set up a website?

Question

With fans coming on board I think it would be beneficial if we had a website, with Christian values, to share what we have to talk about in writing, genres, format , etc.; and to be a support to those who are new to wading the waters as a writer.
Grandma Sam

Answer 1

2006-10-15: first, you must choose and register a domain name. For more information, see how do I register a domain name?
Next, you must choose a web hosting company to host your site for you. Hosting prices vary from $5/month on up depending on the nature of your site and the amount of traffic you expect; extremely popular sites can expect to pay for a more expensive plan, or to pay extra bandwidth charges.

webhostingtalk.com offers well-established forums in which to discuss the quality of various web hosting providers.

Third, you will need to create your web site's content. In most cases you will already own one or more programs that can be used to save web pages in the World Wide Web's HTML format. For instance, both the 100% free OpenOffice suite and Microsoft Office offer a "Save As..." HTML capability in their word processor software. Creating a web page with these tools is much like writing any other document, with the addition of the ability to make links to other pages and sites.

But how exactly do you make a link from one page to another? In OpenOffice, this is very easy to do:

1. Select the text or image in your document that should become a link.

2. Pull down the "Insert" menu and choose "Hyperlink."

3. In the "Target" field, enter the URL of the page you want to link to. If you are linking to another page in the same folder on your own web site, you can just enter the filename, such as aboutus.html. That's all. This isn't hard - just keep it simple and don't second-guess yourself into getting it wrong! You don't want to enter a complete filename with drive letters and slashes here. Just the name of another page that you plan to put in the same folder one you move your pages to your web site.

4. Click "Apply." This is important.

5. Click "Close."

If you are writing HTML by hand, see the article how do I link to another page or file? for a complete explanation of how to make links.


"Can't I host my own web site at home?" Yes... but it's inconvenient, unreliable, and insecure. Real hosting can be very cheap, as cheap as $5 a month, so think twice before hosting at home. See should I host my own web site at home? and how do I host my own web site at home?
You can name the rest of your web pages anything you like, but be sure to name your "home" page index.html. Web servers understand that index.html is the file to give when the user doesn't specify a particular page. So when a user types in or clicks on a link to www.example.com, the page they get is index.html. If you don't provide an index page, users will see a directory listing or an error message - not professional.

You will also need to create graphics for your site, of course. Your graphics must be in GIF, JPEG or PNG format to be used effectively on the web; please do not put BMP files on the web as they are very, very slow to download and do not work with every browser. All Linux users, and Windows users who are willing to take the time to master a somewhat confusing interface, will want to use GIMP, which is free and very powerful. Windows users should consider the very affordable and user-friendly Ultimate Paint; many features are available without restriction even without the $39.95 registration. Macintosh users and high-end graphics mavens swear by Photoshop.

Fourth, you will need to upload the pages and images you have created to your new web space. Your hosting company will provide instructions for this. Often your hosting provider's instructions call for moving files via FTP or Secure FTP (SFTP). Windows users can do that with FileZilla, a free, open-source, noncommercial FTP and SFTP "client" program. MacOS X and Linux users have command-line FTP built-in, but MacOS X users will probably prefer the user-friendly Transmit program.

Once you've uploaded your files, your site is up!

Webmasters who wish to understand the web more directly and gain more control will be interested in learning about HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the format in which web pages are created. Although I have recommended user-friendly tools above, it is not difficult at all to learn to write your own HTML elements, and you will gain a deeper mastery of the Web that way. For more information, see what are HTML and XHTML?

Professionals and others with a significant budget should also look at Macromedia Dreamweaver, currently the most reputable high-end tool for creating web pages.


Then you should be able to put down your values exactly the way you want. Hope this is helpful.

Answer 2

There are several different parts to setting up a website, and I'm not sure what you're looking for. First of all, you have to have a domain name for your website (unless you're just building a new page to link to another website). The domain name is the web address - www.yahoo.com or www.google.com. I don't know much about getting domain names, but I know that you can set up some websites for free (like Yahoo! Geocities: http://geocities.yahoo.com/) or you can pay for a domain name - the main difference is that, if you have a free account for a website, the host that runs the server (Yahoo! is the host for Geocities, for example) posts ads on your website which paid accounts generally wouldn't have. There are a lot of different hosts, I just don't know much about them.

From that point, if you're trying to figure out how to create the content of the site, unless you have someone who knows HTML or has built sites before, you probably want to use a composer program. The most well-known mainstream program is Microsoft Frontpage. There are also composer programs that come free with some web browsers. For example, Mozilla is a free downloadable web browser (that's the company that makes Firefox). I know that the original Mozilla browser has a composer program in it, if you can still download the original, but I'm not sure if Firefox does or not. Composer programs let you create a webpage the same way that you'd lay out a word document or a power point presentation - you copy, cut, and paste until it looks right and you can insert pictures or links and the composer program writes the HTML code for you.

After the web page is created, you have to upload it onto the website at your domain name through File Transfer Protocol (FTP). There are a lot of FTP programs available to download for free. Basically what it does is it lets you log on to the server where your domain name/website 'lives' (you should get the FTP name and password information when you get the domain name) and then you copy the file with your web page onto the server so that it shows up online. When you want to make changes, you change the file for the webpage and name it the same as the page that you want to update/change and when you copy it onto the server, it automatically replaces the original.

I don't know if that helps, but those are all the steps you have to go through to build a webpage. If you have more questions about clarifying any of the steps or if you aren't getting enough answers here, it would probably be better to post in Computers & Internet - you're more likely to get answers from people who know a lot about it. Hopefully this will give you a better idea about what questions to ask.