Designing this web site.
In the past I tried many futile attempts to create my own website. Most of them failed due to the lack of technical knowledge and experience. Now that I have succeeded in doing that, I wish to share the experience with everyone who wish to create a website. I understand that I am still not the expert but I believe this note can prove useful for a non-techie who wishes to create their own website. I started out at the creation of this website only after I got a free domain name and then I took on to finding out the free web hosting services. I had never ever imagined that I will go to this level of coding for my website. I were way too busy and lazy for that. Thanks to my dear dude “Karthik acharya”, who after seeing my first pure HTML version of the website wanted to know how to create a dynamic web site with RSS feeds on it. That’s when I decided to learn PHP. (PHP is a server side scripting language). I told Karthik that For a novice webpage developer who is starting from scratch (and has no money to spend on the web site), there are basically 4 steps in getting a website done. here’s how, (To make things simple for you I am giving only those options that I believe are the best for you. An expert has a lot of other choices but will be too confusing for the novice user.)
1. Get yourself a URL/Domain name: This is the name by which your website will be known. for e.g.: www.yahoo.com). You can either buy a Domain name or settle for a name like mine - www.sunilkumartk.co.nr (don’t ask me what co.nr stands for? I don’t know). I got this domain name for free from www.freedomains.co.nr .But they wont give you any space for storing your website files. so you will have to find a place where you can put your website files and get the newly obtained domain name to redirect to the website file storing space (also called web hosts.) . Now that is the second step.
2.Web hosting: Free web hosts are hard to find, because there are a lot websites which claim to be free but are not fully free. Like ‘Geocities’ which sucks, with its pop-up ads, and a lot of others that are similar but varies in their number of Ads and banners. My search yielded two good web sites, www.000angels.com and www.phpnet.us. 000angels.com is simple decent web host which lets you host all pure Html sites. It is both efficient and fast. It has a simple online file upload tool with it. but the disadvantage is that it will not support JavaScript for security reasons. Phpnet.us is what I prefer using for the main reason that it supports PHP, Mysql (database), and JavaScript and a wonderful 250 MB space for me. Now that you have space for storing the files. You need design the web site and upload files to this space.
3.Web designing: HTML is the language used for building the simple web pages. No, you need not know html coding for creating a web page or site. There are lot of graphical web designing tools available for you from online wizards to Microsoft applications. The two best among them are Macromedia Dreamweaver and MS frontpage (gets bundled with the MS Office). Although I agree that Dreamweaver is definitely a better editor mainly because it supports all most all scripting languages but still, I prefer Frontpage for its familiarity and ease of use. Well, I cant help you in designing your website but I assure you that Frontpage is simple enough to learn it yourself. second option is to rip off some website that you think will fit your website. just use SaveAs for the webpage and open it with Frontpage for editing the text and images. If you have more than one page in your website, you should create hyperlinks to them from other pages. One of the files that you create should be named ‘index.htm” and that will be the file that gets displayed first. (or so to say- your first page should always be called “index.htm”). Index.htm will actually be your home page.
4. Getting things thru - Now you need to put up the files to the web host. Depending on the web host you use you will either use an FTP client (eg: Filezilla) for uploading files to the server or do it in the file-uploading section of web host account. Once you’ve finished uploading, test your website for proper functioning.
For help at any time just give me a call.
