Are you planning to have a personal website for publishing your biography or a wedding website to share your happy moments with the world. Here is the guide to setup a personal website in just an hour…and it costs you less than $25…
To start a personal website we need following things
1. A Domain Name (A name to represent your website like www.sourcebits.com)
2. A Web Hosting Space (To store your webpages online)
3. Templates (To create a rocking webdesign)
4. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor (To edit your html pages)
So i will tell you how to get all this and how much it cost for you…
Domain: You can get a domain from number of sellers and resellers but its better to go with a good company which is recognized and direct seller. Because we need a good and easy domain control panel to maintain it. A domain name will cost you around $10 or less depending on the seller.
I suggest name.com as it is giving for around $7 per year. And you also get google apps configuration with the domains purchased here.(More on Google APPS). Another large domain seller is goDaddy.com which offers different prices for different domains. Check the offers before buying a domain there.
You can get the domain name registered immediately when you done the payment. you can check whether it is registered or not at who.is website.
Hosting: Hosting is a vast topic to discuss here so we dedicated one post to choose the best hosting for your needs.
But for a personal website i suggest you to go for a linux hosting with cPanel control panel which is very easy to maintain. It costs you around $12 per year if you buy from 3ix.com.
You can also go for a free hosting providers but they are not reliable. One other alternative is Google APPS which is free.
Once you buy the hosting you need to change the DNS in the domain control panel to link your domain name with the space. Your hosting provider will give you the list of name servers to update in the DNS. To avoid this configuration i suggest you to buy both hosting and domain name from same company.
Templates: A template is nothing but a definition of look and feel of your website. Choosing a good template will attract the users to your website. you can find free templates and premium templates from internet, just choose any one of it depending upon your budget..
You will get some free templates if you buy hosting from 3ix. Also you can find free templates in the following websites
http://www.freetemplatesonline.com
http://templatenavigator.com/template.php
you can get a large collection of premium templates at http://www.templatemonster.com
HTML Editor: Once you got the templates you need to customize it. Some templates need photoshop image editor to customize it but its too costly to buy photoshop so go for gimp.
After you customized the templates next step is to edit the content which you are going to put in the website. This needs knowledge of HTML but don`t worry we have number of WYSIWYG editors by using this we can create web pages just like creating a word document in MS-WORD. Of course MS-WORD is also a web page designer but it is not preferred to use MS-WORD as it will insert lost of unnecessary code in your pages and don`t go for Frontpage too, it will do the same thing.
The Best WYSIWYG is Dream-Weaver which you need to purchase from Adobe. It costs you around $399. Which is too costly. So i prefer Amaya
Design as many pages as you want and keep it in a folder…
Next Step is too upload the pages into your hosting space this is done by using FTP. There are number of FTP Clients one of them is core FTP. By using that you can transfer all your files into server and make your website live.
Now invite friends to visit your new website…