Computer Moron Seeks Help!

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Hello,

I have been thinking for some time that I would like to have my own website.

We have been going to Tony Attwood's clinic for many months now and I would like to post information about what we have learned.

Is making a website difficult to do? How much does it cost to have a website? How would I upload stuff onto it?



I want to call my website smelena.com.au - there doesn't seem to be another website in this name.

Help!

Thanks
Helen

websites aren't hard
tripod.com is a great free site maker

If you learn HTML, you can do a lot of basic formatting with it, which is probably all you would need. It might only take a few hours to learn the basics(page and paragraph formatting, linking, font color, size, etc).

HTML is easy to learn and gives you a lot more freedom than a page editor. Although this might be outdated since I haven't worked on webpages much since 2000/2001.

You can also create the website on your computer, and then upload the files to a website later. If I remember right, you can create and edit the pages as .txt files in notepad, and then view it as webpage by renaming it to .html.

Smelena,

Check your PMs, I sent you something I'd like you to think about.

Aaron

As a webmaster, setting up a website is relatively easy once you have done three things:--

1. Subscribe with a hosting company for a website on your server. A small home/starter package will cost only £5 /$10 per month.

In UK I recommend either 1&1 or Fasthosts to hosts your website.

http://www.1and1.co.uk
http://www.fasthosts.co.uk

2. You will need a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software to transfer your files to the server. There are many FTP software on the market. I use AceFTP3 Pro because I do a lot of FTP-ing, and like it done in an efficient manner.

3. You can write webpages (page units of website) using HTML or Dreamweaver or other webdesign software. I personally use HTML as I have complete control over the scripting code in my website.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

It really all depends on how much effort you want to put in. You should be able to do the whole thing for free, bar for getting someone to maintain the domain name you want.

1. Editing the pages.
   
   Recently, for a folk singing festival, I set them up with a skeleton as http://www.SussexSongAndAle.com, purely because they wanted something wildly simple for them to handle themselves.
   
   My (largely unmaintained) website is done with just Seamonkey (it has a full WYSIWYG html editor built in, plus publishing capabilities. You need nothing else. And it's free).
   
2. Domain name.
   
   I use 1&1 for that. I don't know if it makes any real difference, you being on the other side of the planet, except that a more local provider will probably manage the ".au" top level domain stuff. The cost should be peanuts. (For my http://bergbland.co.uk domain, 1&1 would charge me nothing for a year, then £2.99 thereafter.)
   
   Hm. I just had a look (on http://australianwebsites.com). For some obscure reason, a ".com.au" domain will cost you $44 for two years, but a ".org.au" will be half that. If you are using it purely for non-profit, the later sounds sensible. It still seems a bit expensive, to me. Maybe I haven't found the cheapest registrar. Ah! Cheaper .org.au at http://www.netregistry.com.au/domain-name-registration/domain-prices.php - $13.75 for two years.
   
   Once you have the domain name, you can point it at wherever your pages sit. It takes me about two minutes to adjust this, with 1&1.
   
3. Hosting the pages.
   
   There are a few possibilities here.
   
   Firstly, your provider may already give you some space (mine does. In reality, my website is at http://www.auni40.dsl.pipex.com, the detail of which which I forgot! I had to "View Page Info"/"Privacy"/"Links" to check that.)
   
   Failing that, there are various ways to get hold of some free webspace. Some comes with advertising, so I'd pass on those, generally speaking. Have a root around.
   
   Ultimately, you could even host the pages on your own machine! I was doing so, for a while, while developing a website. You have to keep the machine up, running and connected, 24/7(-ish). You also need to use "Dynamic DNS" (see http://www.dyndns.com/services/pricing). I'll guess you're not too interested in this option.

So - total costs: capital costs - zero, ongoing costs - half a dollar a month?

As a website owner myself its pretty easy once you learn how to use the software what will your website be ? (forum,infomation,blog)

Feel free to pm me im more than happy to help

If you are using a recent version of Windows ( IE, Win2000 or later) you already have an FTP client built into the OS. To access it, double click on 'My Computer', and type the adress you want your adress bar. --Example:

ftp://ibiblio.org.

You may be prompted for login ID and Password on some servers, many anonymous FTP sites also request a UID in the form of an email address. ibiblio.org does not.

When you are logged in, you will see several folders appear in the same manner that directory folders appear when you are browsing your HDD. To download, just drag the file/directory, ( CAUTION!! If you are attempting to download a large file like a Linux Distribution, make sure you download the specific release that you are looking for, if not, you may wind up inadvertantly downloading every distribution for all available CPU archetectures!! !) to either your desktop, or the specific folder you want it to download to.

Uploading to a server is just as simple, drag and drop, ( Or copy and paste, if you prefer) the files you want into the FTP window. In my opinion, one of the few really great things that MS has done with software is to build a compltely transparent FTP client into their Operating Systems, many people are unaware of it's existance.

I'm not sure exactly when thaey changed it to graphical. I think that "ftp" was available at the command line way before that.

One problem with MS and their graphical stuff... it hides too much up its sleeves! I was helping two friends mange files on their webspace. Both of them, and myself, were using Demon as our IP. To access the webspace, we all used the same address. I found it so awkward to force it to switch username/password, which it just hangs onto for the specific address ( ftp://ftp.webspace.demon.co.uk or some such ).

Anyway. I'm happily using Seamonkey's inbuilt publishing capability, which lets you keep a local image of all files on your site(s) and easily upload to wherever you like. Plus all the other things I get under Linux... like "wget" for slurping entire sites to a local copy.

It was indeed, but not too many casual Windows users know Unix commands.

No, not if you go to freewebs.com.