Posts Tagged ‘building’
Question Asked: How Do I Get Started Building A Website?
Before getting started on your website, there’s a few things you should be made aware of, which you generally might not know:
- Building a website involves an enormous learning curve.
- It’s a lot of work to build and maintain a website
- Learning HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language, what makes websites look like websites) is like learning a foreign language.
- There are a million different ways to do a million different things for a website.
- It’s a never ending learning process.
With that said, the first few things you should gather are the following (I’ll explain why you need each of them after the list):
- Web-hosting: There’s literally hundreds of thousands of web-hosts out there.
- Understanding of what your website will be about.
- Desire to learn.
- An FTP program
- A domain name
- Possibly a web-design application. Generally WYSIWYG editors are great for beginners.
You’re probably already confused by the list above, so let me try to explain what each of these things is, how they work, and they purpose they serve.
Web-host: A web-host is a company that provides server space to you, to host your website. How that generally works is simple, you create your HTML files (or PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc) and upload them through an FTP client to the web-host’s space. That web-host then provides that HTML (web-document) via the internet, through a domain name, to someone who requests it. Other websites out there may provide diagrams about how this actually works, but those often tend to be more complicated than not.
My warning about web-hosts is that you generally get what you pay for. A cheaper web-host might now always be the best one out there. You need to analyze what you need the website to do, before making a decision. A web-host purchase shouldn’t be a spur of the moment purchase.
Understand what your website will be about: Generally when people want to put a website online, it’s for a purpose. Whether it be a blog, an online shopping site, a photo album, etc, generally there’s an understanding of why you want a website. Without having one, it’s very tough to get a designer/programmer to build you something that you want.
Desire to learn: As I said, building and maintaining your own website is a daunting task. As someone who runs a large number of them in their free time, I can attest to this from first hand experience. There’s always a learning curve with building a website, and it seems to never end. You really have to want to learn, in order to succeed.
An FTP program: FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. That generally means that the FTP application takes your HTML (or other programming language) files from your computer, and copies them over to your web-host’s space. They’re generally pretty easy to use, and function just like Windows, with drag and drop.
A Domain name: Selecting your domain name is usually one of the toughest things to do, to start a site. Mainly because the majority of “good” ones are already taken. The domain name that you pick should not only accurately represent your website, but also be easy to remember, so you can ensure return visitors.
Domain names are generally .com, .net, .org, or .biz (those are known as TLDs), but can have any number of suffixes on them. For example, there are country specific TLDs (.rs, .us, .co.uk,. co.nz, etc), and other types of TLDs include .mobi, .cc, .fm, .am, and .cn. Be sure to pick the one that works the best for you.
Domain names generally range from $5 to $35. Anyone that tells you buying a domain name for $35 is the “right” price, is lying to you. There’s no difference in a $35 domain name versus a $5 domain name. They all serve the same purpose, and work the same way.
A Web-design application: Many people will tell you that if you can’t “code by hand in notepad” that you’re not really a webdesigner. And while I agree with that (to an extent), it’s not always true for beginners.
When getting started, you may want to invest in a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), such as FrontPage
These applications more or less let you drag and drop elements onto your page, where you want them to go. And then it writes the necessary HTML code for you. Some of the better ones, such as Dreamweaver
Once you decide on what your website is about, you need to pick a web-host. Like I said, there’s literally hundreds of thousands of them out there to pick from. So what should you look for?
- Up-time guarantee - This guarantees that the server(s) that your website is located on will be available to the general internet for a certain percentage of time. 99.999% is generally a standard. If anyone promises 100%, they’re lying, stay away from them.
- Price - obviously you want to get a good deal. Most shared hosts range from $3.95 to $16.96 per month. When just starting you don’t need a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or Dedicated Server (both of which are much, much more expensive, and overkill for beginners)
- Features - You may want to run a message board, blog, or photo album that requires MySQL (pronounced My Sequel) database access and PHP. Ensure that your potential host offers both of those, most do nowadays.
- Availability of support - is technical support 24/7? Most are, but some aren’t. Some offer 24/7 support by email only, or live chat only. Getting someone on the phone is generally the best way to resolve any problems you’re having.
- Money back guarantee - When you first sign up, you might decide you don’t like what they have to offer. Many “shared” hosts don’t offer a demo to try out before you sign up, so you may decide you don’t like it after you do. Some, not all, hosts offer a money back guarantee, which may prove valuable to you.
Once signed up with a web-host, you’ll want to get familiarized with their control panel. Hosts use all different kinds, from cPanel, to vDeck, to HSPHERE, to Plesk, and many many more. You’ll use the control panel to set up your domain name, your FTP login details, and your e-mail addresses. As each one of these panels varies greatly, I won’t get into details on how to do that here.
Once you’ve got some familiarity with the control panel, it’s time to get started building your website. Some great resources you should check out to help you learn code, and what it does:
- lissaexplains.com - a great, and helpful, website that explains HTML in simple laymen’s terms.
- dynamicdrive.com - provide some great code snippets to help you achieve basic things with your website.
- hotscripts.com - similar to Dynamic Drive, but geared more towards programmers, than novices.
Those three websites should be more than enough to get you started on learning code. To get started on actual design work, I’d recommend checking out the following:
- webreference.com - great beginner’s guide to learning and understanding design
- designtutorials.com - a great place to learn what makes a design good.
- good-tutorials.com - great place to learn design via HTML, as well as Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator
You may also want to look into open source applications to power your website. Applications that are pre-built, free of charge, and supported by the people who make them. For example, this site’s powered by WordPress, which is one of the best blog management applications available today. Some other applications that might help you get started:
- WordPress - Blog Management Software
- phpBB - Discussion Forums
- osCommerce - online shopping cart software
- ZenPhoto - photo album management software
Obviously, there’s hundreds of thousands of applications available out there. The four listed above are ones I’ve used, and have found easy to work with, especially for beginners. It really all depends on you, what level of knowledge you have, and what level of comfort you have with following directions (to make modifications).
WordPress, phpBB, and ZenPhoto are all highly recommended, because they are based on “themes”. That means you can find a theme that you like, install it, and instantly your website will look like this new theme. There’s tens of thousands of themes available for WordPress and phpBB that are free of charge, and you can use on your website.
WordPress, phpBB, and ZenPhoto also utilize a “plugin” system. Plugins allow you to add functionality to the application without making any changes yourself. Plugins range from improving things that the application already does, to adding new functionality all together.
Once you decide on how you’re going to power your site (either via an open source application, or build it yourself), it’s just a matter of doing the work, putting the content together (whether it be blog posts, or photos for your gallery, or products for your store), and uploading it via your FTP program, to the web-host’s server.
I could probably go on in great detail about the ins and outs of how to actually build the website, but that wasn’t the question that was asked. If you want more details about what to do after you’ve gotten started, feel free to ASK MJ, and I’ll answer.
Thanks for the question, it’s always great when I can write about something I know, without having to do a bunch of research. Hope you enjoyed the answer, sorry it’s so verbose!
Question Asked: What is the Tallest Building In The World?
The tallest building in the world is the Burj Dubai (in Dubai), which is just over two thousand (2,000) feet tall. That’s more than a quarter mile high.
At roughly $4 billion dollars, it’s also one of the most expensive skyscrapers ever built. But seriously, who wants to go to Dubai to see this thing? I certainly don’t.