I want to build my own website. Everyone says it's so easy, but WTF???
Should i buy a program that walks you through it, or is it really that easy? I also need to get a domain name. . . any advice will be greatly appreciated, Luvz, SImONe

really depends on what kind of web site your building i have a friend that didn't go for school for this stuff an he has build some great sites over the years still is uses one of them for buisness i used to watch him work at them its amazes me how well he did it

i built one once on google, as a tester, but it was shotty at best, and the placement was awkward, what i need is a professional one i can get with paypal account and stuff. insert pics, should i just pay someone...because people keep saying it's really easy to do. my friend was going to help me, but since they is so damn busy at work....i dont think i can wait that long.

depends on what ya want an if u really want to do that my friend that does it depends could charge 100 for it or 500 for like i said most places would do more then that not really sure

Crumb, well thanks for your help. I have some things to think about. I also want to design my own banner artwork. . to apply on the headline-it just seems to complex for me to be doing myself.

yw do some more research online bout stuff like that too that will help ya as well

Just a little personal website?
Not that I have experience but there are a bunch of low-cost hosting sites. godaddy comes to mind (are they still around?)
My ex-wife started a site of her own and there were on-site tools for her to use to build her pages. She'd asked me for help with something, once, and the interface seemed fairly straightforward. I don't remember the host, though. Sorry.
Another tool is joomla. I used to edit for a guy that used joomla and that was pretty slick. Powerful but easy to use. He'd set me up with admin permission but I didn't want the responsibility, so I demoted myself to editor- I could edit text but couldn't add or remove the actual content- pretty slick!

Don't forget to give us your address when you get it online!

I used to have my own little personal website a few years back.

Completely free. I used Geocities as my free host (which shut down).

I tried a few other free website hosts. Here are a few I saw some potential in, but never took the time to fully experience.

www.wix.com

www.webs.com

www.webstarts.com

www.yola.com


I would highly recommend webs.com because it's very customizable. I believe if you wanted to purchase your own domain, you have that option, and they can also submit you're website to search engines such as google and yahoo (once it's crawled and approved) for free.

Good Luck! Have fun

I design & develop sites for a living, and while lots of people say "it's easy" there's so much more to it than you might think. For any given site I use between 3-5+ programming languages, then again I'm a professional & never use programs to generate my code, but if you are going to use any program I'd suggest Dreamweaver, & if you're smart you can get it for free :)

Weigh your options: Pay a professional, dedicate thousands of hours to learning how to do it the right way, or be okay with a junk site(there's no shortage of them)

Good luck :)

if you are going to start anywhere the place would be to just learn HTML and use a simple text editor or even something like notepad++. You arent going to make a super spectacular website with just a text editor but once your brain gets to understanding how that works you will be able to figure out other programs like flash, photoshop, dreamweaver, and others easier

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

i learned how to do html and javascript when i was 12 so it couldnt be too hard

Like everything in life...it IS easy, assuming you know how. If you dont (and dont have a few years to spend practising your skills) then you want to be paying someone to do it for you. Be careful though - a lot of these so called 'web professionals' know jack ****. Pick carefully and shop around :)

Wow, thanks for all the advice. My nephew does it for a living and now he has offered to help me. I dont really want to use a host site, that may actually shut down at some point. Not sure. Still sorting out my options.

Search on google for tutorials. It's out there and easy to find, but you have to put some effort into looking and learning.

You can start with basic html, which will allow you to understand what you're going to be working on.

It is easy if you're just doing a basic site without anything fancy. I doubt she's going to be working on something super fancy that will involve 3 - 5 programming languages.

Actually my website is going to be very fancy, which is why i am having someone else do it for me. Its for one of my new business'. I think it will be worth it to just hire someone, but my nephew already offered to do it for me....so kudos to me.

Oh, ok. Sorry for assuming it wasn't. I was just going with what you said about building it and thought you were doing it yourself. Good luck!

Well, yeah I had thought about it, being a cheap jew that I am, cutting costs is always a priority. But after some consulting and all the different things I want on it, it's better to have a professional handle it for me. I'll probably take notes though for next time. :)

Hi Simone


The one thing people forget is a website is a virtual store or virtual product knowledge center. I've been online since 1999 with mixed results.
You wouldn't open a REAL store without advertising. Having an address is simply NOT enough.

Site optimization or SEO is A MUST for superior search results, but it's expensive... about 5000$. ("Organic" page placement ie:google is what your aiming for....It's Free growth!)

Other marketing options are "pay per click" on google (top of page shaded or right of page shaded) basically, you must come up with a monthly advertising budget.... let's say 100$/month or 2$ per click... 50 clicks and your promotion is done.

Or you can place adds in newspapers promoting your website but that's counter productive in my opinion... might as well do the pay per click at that point because your audience is already at the computer searching.

Good luck!

The new trend in Internet Marketing and websites is just to set up an account with a server (I love Hostgator) and then just set up a blog.

There are blog themes you can get for free and programs that will create your own personal blog themes.

The advantages of having a blog website is that it is easy to add stuff to it and update it.

Even if you have a regular website it is good to have a blog attached to that. I have lots of sites but I am getting rid of some of them and only keeping the ones I like and use.

This is my painting blog:http://gloria-jean.net

This site was totally built for me by artist's websites, I pay $30.00 per year for it. I can upload my paintings to it and I did design the header myself. http://gloria-jean.artistwebsites.com/index.html

Oh yeh and my tarot site:http://www.infinitevisionstarot.com/

My first site is about my home town: http://www.springfieldcolorado.com/

It is not necessary to spend a lot of money on SEO unless you have the money and not the time to learn about optimization of your site for search.

I have found that the title tags are very important, bold type and headlines with key words also.

When I first started my name, Gloria Jean, was lost in a maize of Gloria Jean's coffee websites, and also behind other Gloria Jeans out there. There other artist's and another tarot card reader by that name with higher ranking than me.

You still have to advertise to get people to your sites, no doubt about it. But once you get them there, you have to give them something or they are gone in less than 3 seconds.

If you type Gloria Jean tarot, you will find my site on page one, but probably not on the top of the page.