How to begin with my new website?

[Wilford]

Hello everyone. I just discovered steve's site just a short while ago and it has inspired me to make my own website. I have made an agreement with my friends to make a blog together. I would like to get it ready asap and figure out more advanced things as I go. (Ready fire aim, eh!?)

Anyways, I just was wondering if anyone can tell me what I do once I get a website. I just got a domain name from godaddy.com, and now I am totally clueless on where to go from there. I thought godaddy would allow me to edit the site with a builder or something but nothing is available without paying more money... So to start off, I honestly know nothing on how to make and manage a site and I would like if someone can tell me how or point me towards a good tutorial.

I honestly have no knowledge beyond the crappy builder from geocities.com, so I don't know where to start to get my site going. I'm not sure if it's something in the godaddy.com that I need to start uploading html files or if I have to use something like dreamweaver to edit the site, etc. In other words, completely lost.

Anyways, any help would be awesome. Thanks in advance.

[tobyhede]

I think you might have to pay some money in the end.

What I would suggest going to wordpress.com and setting up a blog.
You can, for a very small annual fee (about $10), then pay to have wordpress host the blog under your domain. This is optional ... you can use your wordpress blog while you learn about the technology.

Alternatively, you can pay for some hosting. I would recommend Dreamhost. Other hosts are documented in the hosts thread (sticky at the top of this section of the forums).

[Wilford]

Hmm, I would still prefer to pay as little as possible to get something going.

Riht now, I am just trying to figure out how one would go about editing the website itself. I mean, do you need a program that would access andchange the html files on the server or is it something like simply giving a login to access a large chunk of html code or something... that's what I need to know right now.

[finandom]

Welcome to the blogging world!

1. First I recommend you go to wordpress.com and download the free blogging platform. For installation, you can follow the guide in the site. The steps are easy.
2. Go to Theme Viewer and download a theme for your blog.
3. Then choose a passionate topic. Please select those topics that you really enjoy and can spend most of your time on.
4. Concentrate to write article around your selected topic and post it to your blog.

Above is just the 4 simple steps that I can recommend to you. There are a lot to learn in order to keep a successful blog. If you want, you can download a free ebook about blogging from the link under my signature. It is free but the content inside is worthy. I'm also using what I learn from the book for my blog.

[1000feet]

You probably will want to pay for hosting - godaddy has some very cheap options that are good for getting started. You don't actually get anything with the domain but the domain itself, so you need to pay a host to store everything for the site.

I have sites with godaddy and lunarpages, and they both have control panels where you can install software such as wordpress on your site and have it set up for you. They also have some "site builder" packages that they charge extra for, but I have no experience with those.

[tobyhede]

With a blog tool such as wordpress, the software handles the page updates for you. You don't need to know any HTML at all. You log in and use an WYSIWYG editor.

If money is an sticking point, forget the domain for now. Create a free wordpress.com blog (which you can host at domain.wordpress.com). When you're comfortable, you can pay wordpress to host the domain, or you can find a paid host and traansfer the free wordpress into your own wordpress. It's one-click to export and import between wordpresseses - really easy.

You can be up and running in about 5 minutes and confident that the system can grow with you.

[Wilford]

yeah, that's the other thing I was not sure of... Will wordpresss allow me to paste a block of html into the blog for adsense and such?

I was not planning on having a simple blog, I'll also have some pictures and audio, but the blog will be the main center of the site. Will wordpress also allow these in some way?


Thanks for the suggestions so far By the way.

[Minsc]

You can do whatever you want with it if you host it on a normal webhost.

I'm not sure about wordpress.com.

[Gene]

Originally Posted by Wilford

yeah, that's the other thing I was not sure of... Will wordpresss allow me to paste a block of html into the blog for adsense and such?

I was not planning on having a simple blog, I'll also have some pictures and audio, but the blog will be the main center of the site. Will wordpress also allow these in some way?


Thanks for the suggestions so far By the way.

WordPress will do all that for you and more. It is an elegant solution which is better than anything I can construct on my own. With plug ins which are available for free, podcasting audio and video are easy. Pictures are also easy.

[Wilford]

erm, I am now a bit confused...

Ok, so I would like to include a few ads on my site, which is a .com that leads to a www.name.wordpress.com site. It would appear that wordpress does not allow ads (Adsense and other Ads « WordPress.com), even though Steve's blog has ads on it and he uses wordpress.... ???

My only guess is that he made most of the site through programming and somehow inserted the blog within the site, rather than what I do with a redirecting.

If that's the case, how might I go about doing the same thing? I want ads, but I don't want to get my blog deleted over it.

Please help!

-
Wilford

[Gene]

Originally Posted by Wilford

erm, I am now a bit confused...

Ok, so I would like to include a few ads on my site, which is a .com that leads to a www.name.wordpress.com site. It would appear that wordpress does not allow ads (Adsense and other Ads « WordPress.com), even though Steve's blog has ads on it and he uses wordpress.... ???

My only guess is that he made most of the site through programming and somehow inserted the blog within the site, rather than what I do with a redirecting.

Steve does not host his WordPress blog at wordpress.com. Your solution is to obtain hosting elsewhere. Make sure the other hosting you choose has WordPress available as an automatic install. I prefer sites using Fantastico.

There will be a fee required for hosting. The fee will vary depending on the amount of bandwidth, online storage and other things. I know there are some hosting providers on this board. Caveman Joe is one and offers hosting cheaply, you might check with him or others here.

[Minsc]

Originally Posted by Wilford

Please help!

"Wordpress" means two different things:
1. Software that you can use to make a blog with, if you host it yourself.
2. A web host that will host the software for you.

If you make a blog at wordpress.com, they won't allow ads. They would also probably limit the type of content you can have since they're hosting.

If you download Wordpress from wordpress.com, and host it on a different server, you can have ads. You could probably do whatever you wanted with it as long as you kept the copyright.

You can't use ads because your blog's address is at wordpress.com. You would need to buy hosting from a different company, download Wordpress for free, and install it onto your website.

EDIT: Also, it won't take long to install it manually... You don't need an auto-install. And I guess you might be able to find a free web host that has MySQL and PHP, but you're better off paying.

[mister_mojorisin]

Hi Wilford,

I can relate to your want of free tools to help with getting your blog going. Consider some of the free tools available...

NVU - Open source HTML editor...similar to Dreamweaver
Top-Style Lite - CSS editor
Pixie - Cool little color chooser
OSWD - Open source web designs
W3 Schools - Web tutorials (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc)
Joomla - Content Management System (CMS)

If you are interested in an all-in-one website builder package consider Site Rubix. Using free tools are great to cut down on start-up costs but the learning curve can be a bit steep at the beginning of building a website or blog. The time you spend learning and the trial and error could be time wasted when you could be making more blog posts and optimize your keywords for the search engines.

I hope this is helpful