How to design and host your own website - a quick and easy guide
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Creating a website can be a simple project, if you're familiar with the process and know your options. Putting together a more powerful website that does all the things you want it to do can still be simple, but will require a little more time and experience. Here's a quick guide to building your own site and getting it live on the internet, with additional support if you get stuck.
- Go to 110mb.com and create a free account.
- Upgrade your free account with a one-time $9 fee to enable unlimited MySQL access. MySQL is a database used for storing data that many websites use, for storing blog posts and user accounts, for example. You may or may not also want to enable e-mail capability for your new website for a one-time fee of $7.
- When those are enabled, usually within 24 hours, log into your account and create a new directory to house your new website.
- Create a MySQL database for your website to use, through the 110MB Panel's menu options. Create an initial user to go along with that database, and assign permissions between them (It will be all right there on the MySQL page in your account.)
- Go to Drupal.org and download Drupal 5 (not Drupal 6!). Extract the file, recompress it as a .zip file, and upload it to your new website directory at your new 110mb account.
- Click on the red box icon next to the file in your 110mb account, to extract the files. You should see all kinds of new files and directories appear. When that happens, delete the original .zip file.
- Right-click on the file: install.php and open it in a new tab or window.
- Drupal will then guide you through the process of creating your website as you would like it. You may want to install additional modules to allow your site to do the things you would like it to do. You can get them from Drupal.org, by clicking on Modules on the right. You download, extract, and re-zip the contents the same way you did with the Drupal 5 file, and upload them to your 110mb account in the directory: modules From there, you can enable the modules through Drupal's Administration -> Modules menu.
- Use the menus within Drupal to arrange everything as you would like it to look, and add the content you want your site to have. You can always add new modules if you want your site to do new things, and there are easy ways to tell Drupal to make your site look much, much different if you want it to as well.
- Contact me here if you would like some assistance with this, or if you would like me to take care of it all for you. I design websites on a freelance basis.
- Have fun!
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Comments
Good info. However, Hubpages works well for me. Here's a link to my most popular Hub:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Unemployment_Compensation_
I'm glad it was of service to you, premsingh! Thanks for joining my "fan club". =)
What do you think of places like weebly.com and wordpress.com that let you set up your own site with templates? I'm going to try your instructions here and see how it goes. It's so great to have someone here who knows about this stuff! Thanks!
While I haven't used weebly or wordpress, I know that 110mb allows you to install wordpress easily, either on your own or with their One-Click Installer, and I keep hearing about it on forums. People love it, and I can see why. (110mb will probably be fine with weebly too, you may just need to install the script yourself... it's very simple to do.)
I've been known to get an idea and throw a website together in less than a day on my 110mb account... http://pinkslab.com/ is one of them. I don't do any HTML myself - although I know I can look it up for free at http://www.w3schools.com/ whenever I need to - because I use Drupal. Drupal is a free, open-source platform for website creation, and its users come up with all sorts of add-on modules for it that will allow a website made with Drupal to do just about anything. Drupal uses graphics and menus, by the way, so there's no coding to do - the people who write the modules do all of that. And since it's all designed to work within the same system... everything works together. It's like a website design kit that anyone can use. And I absolutely love it.
(If you're going to use Drupal, I'd advise sticking with Drupal 5 for just a little longer, until more modules are updated to work with Drupal 6. The module-writers out there are upgrading most of the modules for Drupal's new release very quickly, and you can always upgrade your site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 later on, when everyone's caught up.)
What are your thoughts on a flash based site?
Hi there! I tend to avoid them, myself. I've used Ning once in a while because it's easy to set up a social collaboration site-let in about five minutes. But the downsides are that they're resource-intensive on the server side of things as well as in high demand by the average internet user - leading to massive slowdown when on the server side of things when they're attempting to process it all and serve it to the users.
Additionally, I find them to be unnecessarily proprietary - put your data into a Flash site, and it pretty much stays in that Flash site. There usually isn't a way to keep the data stored in a universal format that can be shared with different types of platforms - as contrasted with PHP/MySQL sites, where it's in a database that can be accessed by other platforms, if you ever want to do things differently or go with another scaffolding system you can.
So, I've admittedly not used Flash-based sites much myself for those reasons. My information on it may not be current. But last I checked, the impression I was left with was, "If you want it done quick, dirty, and essentially uselessly, do it in Flash." I'm a big fan of Drupal because with open-source module development, for anything you want to do there are a hundred different ways to go about doing it. (And about three of them work! But that still leaves you with three feasible options.) Flash is great for games and graphics, and adding Flash here and there on a website can be just the thing to catch the eye... but to my knowledge it just wasn't made to run efficiently on servers and implement websites with.
Thanks for your readership, and your Comment!
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premsingh says:
2 years ago
Thanks Satori for the information requested. You did a nice job.