Recently I set up a website for the first time. I've used Blogger and Google Page Creator and Wordpress and Tumblr and and so on (and for that matter Geocities, back in the day), but this couldn't be a blog or a wiki, so the automatic template goodness of those services was not in the mix this time.
- Shop carefully for your domain name. Go Daddy has plenty of competition, and there is a wide range of product (just the name, versus the name plus hosting, what that hosting includes, etc.) and pricing.
- Free hosting definitely falls into the "get what you pay for" category. Sure, there are reams of free hosts, some who even offer an ad-free space, with reasonable storage and bandwidth. But after going through two of these (8tt and Gigacities) and finding the downtime unacceptable, I read a little more about this area and discovered that, as usual, others had been there before me and found the same thing. If you need your site to be up all the time, and if you don't want to hop from host to host as they fly by night, you are probably going to have to pay something.
- If you are like me and you are going to want to customize provided templates at least a little, you are going to want to work with some web software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage (I couldn't even get the FP page to come up properly, actually, which may have been related to something to do with MS Office, if I am to believe the message that appeared). So I didn't look into the MS products, but man the Adobe stuff is pricey! Fortunately, there are free trials which allow you to get a feel for the application to know whether you are likely to continue working in it, thereby justifying the investment. And even if you're not going to continue, you will be able to achieve your one-off results within the usual 30-day period of the trial.
- Somehow I ended up customizing to the point where I finally realized I needed to start from scratch and design my own pages. This was not as hard as I thought it might be. Dreamweaver's Spry stuff is essentially pushbutton scripts. Sure I'm oversimplifying a bit, but truly I was able to incorporate interface elements and effects that I would never be able to code, simply by selecting things out of menus and then doing a little followup in Google as to why this or that was not behaving as I expected.
- In getting feedback on the look and feel of your site and its navigation, be sure to ask which OS and browser the site was viewed in. All of the browsers have their peculiarities in how they display certain code, and most of those peculiarities have workarounds which are readily searchable.
- Don't forget to add your URL to Google and Yahoo search engines. Would they find you on their own? Probably, eventually. But you can submit them for free, so why wait or leave it to chance.
