How to Build Your Website
People frequently ask one of the following questions - How can I guild a website? Isn’t it hard? Don’t I have to know all that code stuff? What about FTP and those other acronyms?
Now, if you want to build a website like, say, Amazon.com, then yeah, it’s gonna be far beyond the capability of one person. But a site this one is remarkably easy and you don’t have to know anything about code. No HTML, no CSS, and no other alphabet soup terms.
The easiest way to build a website is to hop over to Blogger.com and sign up. Fill in a few blanks, pick a template (which you can easily change later,) and you’re good to go. This Warcraft Tips blog is an example. You get a slick looking site which you can set up in 5 minutes.
The best part? It’s 100% absolutely free. You couldn’t buy anything for that site if you wanted to. In fact, Google (which owns Blogger) has linked it’s Adsense program to blogger. So once you get your blog up and running and have written a few posts you can apply to Adsense and start making a bit of money from your blog, with no out of pocket expense.
You can learn a lot more about putting up your own site here: How to Build Your Website. Obviously once you get your feet wet with the Blogger set up you might want something more. You might not. Blogger has some pretty popular blogs on its system and it’s highly customizable.
The next stop up will cost you a few dollars, but not for the software. This is for a Wordpress blog. You’ll want to buy web hosting with a user control panel called cpanel. There’s one huge reason that you want cpanal, it comes with a program called Fantastico which will let you set up a Wordpress blog just by filling in a few blanks. This is utterly superior to going to the WP site, downloading the software (free!), unpacking it, setting up a database, uploading it to your host, etc.
So why a blog instead of what’s called a static site? A few reasons:
- The search engines, such ad Google, love blogs. This means that it will be a little easier for people to find whatever you’re writing.
- Blogs are amazingly easy to maintain. Just post and go. You don’t have to fuss with changing menus, fussing with code, etc. Unless you want to.
- Want to change? Blogger blogs are highly customizable and Wordpress blogs are even more so.
Start with the basics first, get your feet wet, get comfortable with how the system works, and then start customizing a bit. Change themes if you like, add some links, etc. It’s all pretty easy, even for the technophobe.