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Starting your first website!

Thread title: Starting your first website!
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02-25-2010, 08:56 PM
#1
xTracted is offline xTracted
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  Old  Starting your first website!

In this article I’m going to explain how to start up your first website. Whether its a blog, forum, or just a personal website. You don’t need much experience; you need dedication. I remember some odd years ago visiting a site that was terrible looking; and three years later it is one of the best looking sites I’ve seen. Anyways onto the point of this article.

What you will need:
- A Domain Name
- Web hosting
- A template for your website
- Time and dedication


Domain Name
A domain name is the website you type in the address bar to go to the page your looking for. Its pretty simple to get your domain name – on average they go for about $8-10, When choosing a domain name you should make sure its relevant to your website. You wouldn’t have a forum about apples and call it www.bannaforum.com would you? A good domain register company would be Go Daddy.


Web Hosting
Choosing your hosting provider is a very crucial part when it comes to setting up your website. Simply because you want to get the best quality as well as the best bang for your bucks. You don’t want your pages loading incredibly slow do you? I hope not; because I know if I ever went to a website for the first time and it was slow I hit the back button and went to a different website. Also, take into mind how much storage and bandwidth you’ll need; At first this won’t be much but as your site grows you might need more. People spend thousands of dollars on web hosting; your first web hosting should cost about $10. A great web hosting company is Host Gator. Use code hgc25 to get your first month for $0.01. If you don’t wish to invest money you can find lots of free web hosts out there!


Template
If you do not have the money to hire someone to design and code your template there are many free templates you can find across the web. I have some available for download here. Only thing we ask is that you do not remove the copyright link to my site. If you want to attempt to design your own template visit Adobe and find Photoshop CS4 (You can use the trial for 30 days). Good luck to you guys on this part


Time / Dedication
Here is what I learned in all my years of web development. You need to be patient; your website cant grow to thousands of hits a day in a week. If you have a interesting site with lots of good information, and something that no other website has, give it a year and don’t give up! Submit your website to search engines, make a signature on forums you use, talk to other topic related sites in sharing advertisement for each other. Stick at it you can do it!
Resources


Blogger – Start your own blog for free. Hosted by google – so you know its good!
Free Forums – Get your free phpBB forum. One of the best sites I know for free forums.
Free Templates – This is a website with hundreds of free templates for you to chose from.
Free Hosting – Good website for free decent hosting.


This concludes my article about starting your first website. If you need any help feel free to comment and I will point you into the right direction.

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03-02-2010, 07:36 PM
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michael84p is offline michael84p
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  Old

And you need content for your site.. High quality relevant content...
It may bee a hard work to write it yourself.
You can take it from free content directories or buy it

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03-02-2010, 11:31 PM
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Aaron Moody is offline Aaron Moody
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  Old

Why is everything tailored to people who want free? That shouldn't be the first criteria for a website. Quality > price.
Nice article non the less

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03-17-2010, 02:50 AM
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Samshelton22 is offline Samshelton22
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  Old

I have to say I agree with Aaron here. If you can't afford your own website, you shouldn't be in the web industry.

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03-18-2010, 12:32 AM
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hoowill12 is offline hoowill12
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  Old

I've done two websites in the past, but they were really bad (and also there was a significant time gap between both times).

I'm currently starting a new website, and I found a VERY useful tutorial: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ht...erstand-steps/
This just helps you figure out how you should go about coding, what each little code works like, etc. I recommend it to whoever is starting their first website (the NETTUTS+ website is great in general)

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03-18-2010, 12:52 PM
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Jully25 is offline Jully25
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  Old

Thanks, very useful information.

But could you advise some websites with templates to look through and choose what I need.

I'd be very grateful for several sites.

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03-18-2010, 06:55 PM
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hoowill12 is offline hoowill12
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If I were you, I wouldn't use templates. I don't think you'll learn as much if you use that than if you try and just built it from scratch. But I might be wrong?

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03-18-2010, 09:24 PM
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Hosting50 is offline Hosting50
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It is much easier to use a template. I have alot of friends that are really good web designers and they still prefer the templates. It is just easy and fast. As long as you are allowed to modify the template then you can re-design/customize it step by step.

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03-23-2010, 01:07 PM
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danmicheals is offline danmicheals
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Spend some to make some. That's the key idea of business. If you spend lots of time creating products and using free tools, in the end you are using money. TIME = MONEY

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03-24-2010, 08:00 AM
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Gatt is offline Gatt
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  Old

Good article you covered many of the important points in starting a website. One thing I'd like to add about domain names, try and avoid domain names using '-' for example test-domain.com.

If you wanted to expand on this article, you could always add in a paragraph or too on ways to make some revenue, for example using adsense.

I also suggest learning more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which will help your website gain more visits and higher page rank on google. For example; trying to get more backlinks.

Very good article though, well covered hope you keep it up.

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