Website - how to???

[call ducks]

Quote:
Tut tut. Bad rebelcowboysnb, bad.

Only if it is not made in a WYSIWYG editer

because some of them have code show up differently

 

[BlacksheepCardigans]

My sites are running on Laughing Squid (my blog and website) and Dreamhost (the ones I set up for other people). Dreamhost seems to be easy to work with and has a good reputation. Most of the popular ones are fine for any site that's not going to get above, say, ten thousand hits a month. If you're above that, like if your blog gets popular, you need to have dedicated bandwidth. That's why mine is on Laughing Squid.

What you need to do is go to one of the hosting sites and sign up for a year of hosting. Most of the time they'll let you register a domain name for free with that package. Don't register the name first and then look for hosting unless you want to pay more. You will need to pay a certain amount - often discounted for the first year to around $50 or $60 - for hosting, a certain amount (maybe $10-ish) for domain privacy, and then after the first year you'll have to pay around $11 each year to re-register your domain name.

The popular hosts all have website tools built in to the control panel. They'll install a Wordpress blog or a Joomla site or whatever you want. A bunch of them also have rudimentary WYSIWYG editors but I would really recommend skipping that and using either Wordpress or Joomla. The WYSIWYG editors all generate crappy code and you'll end up with a site that looks different to every browser, and (more annoying) you'll spend weeks setting up what you could have downloaded for free on day 1.

I know the most about Wordpress, since that's what I use to run my sites. I've been building my own websites since 1995, starting with coding my own stuff and moving to some of the editors and Dreamweaver and so on, and I have to say that Wordpress is fantastic. It's so easy and everything in the code makes sense, and it can be built and maintained by anybody. There are a TON of free themes that are business-friendly now, and you just slot in your own pictures and you're ready to go. You have an instant professional looking site that's easy to navigate and easy to maintain. And what's behind the scenes in Wordpress is a good, solid open-source framework that plays well with everybody.