Your New Website - The Prequel
Before you can put yourself on the web, you need two things: a domain name and a hosting package. Both are easy to get, very affordable, and available today. Once you've got your domain and hosting package, you'll need to wait about two days for the domain to travel through various registration channels before you can publish to it, but that's the only delay.
A domain name is your URL, which is the www.yourbusiness.com address people will surf to once you've published your site. There are literally millions of URLs already out there, and there is a chance the one you wanted is already taken. It's best, then, to have a few backup names in mind when you go to register yours.
A hosting package is the space on someone's server that will hold your website. Servers are big super computers that maintain your website and enable traffic to find it. Hosting packages can vary from very basic services to extraordinary bells and whistles. Which package you choose should be driven by the needs for your website. If, as we're doing in this exercise, you are simply creating a “web presence” site, you only need very basic services.
Registering your domain is easy and cheap. If you Google “cheap domain registration”, you'll see that you can get a domain registered for as little as $2.85 per year…that's cheap. Make sure you read all of the details of the transaction before you give out your credit card number: sometimes you'll find a dirt cheap domain registration tied to a rather expensive hosting package.
Once you've registered your domain, go get your hosting package. The best combination of price and service I've found so far has been at GoDaddy.com. I paid just $3.89 per month for a year's worth of full service hosting from Go Daddy. Their tech support is excellent, and they make it easy to get started.
Download the Software
I Googled “Free web design software”, and found the site freeserifsoftware.com. There you can download their WebPage Plus SE software for free. When you install it, the software requires you to register it, which is also for free. You are quickly emailed an unlocking key, and the software becomes operational.
There are some limitations to the free version, which you can of course overcome by purchasing the full version. You won't need the disabled features in the software in the beginning, so you won't need to purchase it yet. I eventually paid the ridiculously low price of just $39.95 and got the additional features. More on that later.
Open "er Up!
When you first open the program, it asks you to choose from several options: create a site from a template, open an existing file, start from scratch, etc.
Choose Create Site from a Template. Select the template Coffee Shop and click on Open. As soon as you"ve opened it, click on File Save As, and key in the name of your new site. Now the template belongs to you!
The Coffee Shop template is very professional looking, but, unless your web is to be about a coffee shop, doesn't match your needs. That's okay for the moment. Let's look around:
On the right hand side of the template are three vertical boxes, each with a set of tabs across the top. The top and bottom boxes deal with formatting information on the page. The central box, however, deals with the organization of your site. Each of the buttons in that box represents a page in the site. Double click on any of them - you'll see that the button you clicked on now has the “eye” symbol on it, and the page has changed in the main screen. That means you've selected that page in your site.
At the top of the screen is a menu bar. Select View/Master Page. Look at what happens! All of the text and most of the pictures disappear! The Master Page is the backdrop for your site: whatever shows up here will show up in exactly that location on every page in your site.
Right click on the coffee cup picture at the top of the page. You can move it around, you can delete it, you can change it. If you want to put your own picture in there, delete it and then select Insert/Picture …now your picture will show up on every page.
If you have successfully completed these simple tasks, you are ready to start designing your site!
Web Design 101
Me, I'm a writer (that's how come I can use a sentence that simply says “me, I'm a writer”!) It took me a long time to figure out how to put together a website that showed both my written pieces and my interests. Eventually I got around to the idea of focusing the website on my primary interest, Christian drama.
