Creating a website

I would like to create a website and link it to this site but I don't have a clue as to how to go about doing this.
Can someone please explain(in laymans terms) the steps involved with creating and maintaining a webpage.
Thanks in advance
Jackie Lapradd

There are a few different ways to approach a website project. First determine your budget.

1. Free/Inexpensive

There are a number of places out there that provide you with free or inexpensive systems to built a website without any knowledge of programming. Yahoo has a system for example.

Advantages: Easy on the wallet and the head

Disadvantages: Your usually limited to what you can do.

2. Have a designer do a layout for you.

This is usually fine for a business but can be costly.

Advantages: Custom layout and functionality

Disadvantages: Expensive and time consuming.



Once you have determined your budget, you need to figure out what you want the website to do. Figure out what pages you want and what each page will "do". This will make it easier when you are deciding how to build your site (so you don't choose one method and find out 1/2 way through it won't get the job done).

If your looking to build a simple site to display your pictures, link to favorite sites, and tell the world a little about yourself it can be done easily.

Here's some links for you.
Beginners Overview

AngelFire Free System

HomeStead System (Almost Free)

Jackie.... go to....

www.draac.com

and HAVE FUN!!

....Neil

One thing that is often overlooked when considering a web presence is that you can have the most sophisticated, best looking, most user friendly, and absolutely most useful site on the web, but if people can't find you, it will all be for nothing.

Suppose this site you made was located at:

http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/~newsites/~directoryA/~~subsiteDNS_locator/part1/partition12/section4/user270.b/MySite.html

You can't even get a business card big enough to hold that URL and anything else on it. Much less when someone you are talking to asks you for your web address, you will be about to the '~newsites' part of it before they hold their hand up and tell you to email it to them.

What is your business name? What are you specializing in? Ask someone what they would key into their browser right off the top of their head in order to find you if they wanted to find you on the web. If I were looking for a company called Bob's Big Boas, the first thing I would try would be www.bobsbigboas.com. Surprisingly enough, these get hits more often then not.

Anyway, there are a lot of people whom design web pages for a small fee. There is at least one advertising on this site right now. Check them out and talk to them about it.

something else to consider: sometimes, your ISP (internet service provider, for example, AOL, BellSouth, RoadRunner, etc...) will provide you with free space for a webpage. My ISP, BellSouth, allows for 10MB of storage in the form of an html site and/or a photo gallery, or an FTP site (although you can't do much with a 10MB FTP site). Here's my site I created with Microsoft's FrontPage Click here for my site and here's my photo albums (a bit sparse at the moment) Click here for my photo album
My site is currently on it's second version. The first version took several hours (about 10 b/c it was the first site I ever built) and the second version took about 6 and looks MUCH better. Now that I've got a little free time, I'm going to begin exploring what I can do with Macromedia's DreamWeaverMX, a much more powerful and extensive program to design webpages than FrontPage.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that option out there in case you were unaware of it.
Best of luck in creating your page. It's a lot of work, but it's FUN! And the feeling of satisfaction is overwhelming when you complete it!
JB

O.K.,
I went to Homestead, plopped down my $8.00 a month and started work on my new site.
Well when I click on the link it gives me to access my site it says the address can't be found.
Has anyone else out there tried this site? Hopefully I can get a few pointers from you.

In order to view your website. You first gotta have one.
You started work on your site....(you said) But here are a couple things.

When you first log in. It says Download site builder or enter homestead.


Download site builder.
If you downloaded site builder, and you are creating a site. You must make sure that your homepage (first page) is your index. Then You must first save it. Then you must publish it. So after you hit save. Make sure you hit publish. Then it will pop up some kind of screen. Do not worry about it. Just say yes. (I never understood what the pop up screen is for, I just find it useless). Note in order to publish you must be on line.


Enter homestead.
If you entered homestead and are working on your site from on line. All you have to do is hit save and it will automatically save and publish what you were working on.


Tip.
It is easier to download the sitebuilder and make your webpages that way. It saves some space from memory. If you work on your site from the homestead area.....The sitebuilder will be taking up memory. So download and make your site that way.

I hope it made sense. If it did not let me know I will try to reword it. conveying my point on a computer is always so hard.

oh yeah.
Once you hit publish and it is done publishing. That is when you can finally view your webpage. You can always re save and republish as many times as you like.

Thanks everyone for the great advice!
I spent most of last night and all of today putting this
thing together.
Will one of you please follow the link and check out
the photo section? I cannot figure out how to resize
the pictures so they don't take forever to load. I would appreciate it greatly if someone
could fill me in on this.
Thanks!
Jackie Lapradd
http://starofindia.homestead.com/

everything looks great. and profesional.
Not a lot of BS junk like my site.

Anyway you wanted suggestions or what not.
Yes you were to make it appear that the photos are small. but clicking on properties I could tell that the photos were huge.
The only way to truly make them small is to use some kind of photo editing software. The major drawback you will have is slow page loads. People looking at anyones website does not like a website that is slow. Only reason it was not too bad for me is because I have a cable modem. what you gotta do is think of your dial up customer. You don't want to alienate them. When you are all finished, do not forget to go back to homestead and submit your site to the search engines for free. You did (for every single page) go to page properties and put your page descriptions in there right? What you put on there will determine how easy it is for people to get to your site from the search engines.