How to Build a Website
This series of articles is intended to get you up and running on setting up your own website.
It's not a how-to on setting up a webserver in your living room. Instead we'll be using someone else's
computers, the web hosting service's, and put our site on their hardware.
My bias: I like to keep things simple. I'm not a pro designer and I don't get paid to build
sexy sites for people. Unix Tools (this site) and Wordpress blogs are as complicated as I get. So if you're looking for a
high end discussion of web site design, or how to build sexy sites, well, I suggest browsing Amazon.com's book
selection.
I haven't tried all of the site builders or blogging platforms that are out there. So these articles will
be based around what I have had experience with. It will certainly be enough to get you started,
though. Eventually I'll have videos up which will walk you through every procedure that I write about.
Did I leave anything ouit or not answer your site building questions? Hit the contact page and send me a note.
Heck, if what I write here helps you out then let me know!
From here on out additional articles on this subject will be on the How to Build Your Website blog, just next door.
Now you need to ask yourself some questions. Or answer mine:
I'll assume that you haven't put up a website before, or tried and had problems. If it's old hat to you then you
might find some of my comments interesting or completely at odds with your experience. Especially if you build
those big sexy sites (no, I'm not talking about those sites) or use different tools.
- Do you want/need to go 100% free or can you afford a few bucks a month for hosting and a domain name? If
you're not sure then check out our free hosting Vs. paid
hosting page.
- To blog or not to blog, that really is a questions these days. Blogs range from teenage diaries to serious,
professional sites. If you're not sure about blogs take a look at How to
Start a Blog.
- Do you want to build the site yourself? Muck with the code? Or just write and let the software handle
the code? I prefer the later these days, though I used to do all the code by hand. It got complicated and I got
lazy. This site is done entirely with XsitePro. Any HTML/CSS coding that I
might happen to do, which is pretty rare these days, is done with Dreamweaver.
- Here are some tools that you can use to build website.
So what do you want to do? All the articles in this section are below, and
there's more on the blog:
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