Building a website

[Jill]

Hi All!
I am ready to get myself a website but don't know were to start. I have done searches on web address and found sooooo many. Some start at 30 dollars a year for a .com up to 700! I have a name picked out and I ran a search on it and seems it is available. Were should I start? Can anyone recommend a site that is reputable for buying an address. I know I am probably saying this wrong...address,url,link I am confused!!!
Thanks in advance!

[Jill]

I should have done a google search before I asked my question...I found out I am talking about domain name and found out it is 35 dollars and year...the 700 dollar was someone wanting to sell me a name that I asked about....I guess I answered my own question but if anyone has sugestions I would love to still hear your thoughts.
Thanks!

[Doug Nelson]

Try looking at http://www.webhostingtalk.com

Another forum, they even use the same software as here
It's huge, and offers quite candid discussion of good/bad hosts.

[jeaniesa]

Wow - thanks for the question Jill - and your answer Doug! I've got my domain name registered, but am just now thinking about looking around for a webhost. You're link will be invaluable Doug. Thanks! -Jeanie

[cendres]

I would be curious if you were doing this for business or personal. Your own internet provider may offer a certain amount of free webspace. Usually it is about 5 mg. if they offer it.

The downside is the following

-limited space
-can't pick your own domain name

Pictures are what seems to use the most space. If you compress them enough and size them appropriately you can still make your site graphic friendly.

Just my 2 cents - Carl

[Jill]

Thank you so much Doug...I needed that point in the right direction!

[Jill]

Carl, we must have been sending at the same time! I do have some space on MSN, it has so many distracting xtra's I think my age range of customers would get confused (my grandma was my test subject and she gave up!) It is a great idea though~I want a site to use mostly as a portfolio of what I can do and most of my customers are seniors. Thanks so much for answering my question, you guys are just great!

[Paul Rupp]

Domain registration and hosting...

I would recommend dotster.com for registering your domain name and freeservers.com for a host. Dotster.com is one of the least expensive domain registrars that is reliable, they have been around for a while.

On freeservers.com your site is free, but with banner adds, if you would like to get rid of the banners, you have several options. I think for around $6.00 per month you can get rid of the banners. If you want to spend a little more, then you can upgrade the service further and get more space. I think you get 20 meg to start.

I have my site hosted there and have been pretty happy with there service.

HTH

Paul R.

[Rick]

Try 10-domain.com

I got a couple of domains there for $10 a year!


As far as hosting goes, I'd have to see who I use to hosts mine, but it's like another $10 a month.

Very reasonable rates, even.

What program are you going to design it in? I highly suggest Dream Weaver.


Rick

[Jill]

Thanks for your suggestions. This was quite a project for me! I had to learn some new words...and learn to be patient! I made my web pages in microsoft publisher 97 (got for 2 dollars at a g-sale and figure what the heck I will try it!) I followed Dougs link and have signed up with WHN (web hosting network) I got my domain name thru a company they use and it was 9.95. The web host is 6.95 a month and have used 2 of the 50 Megawhatzits that are alloted. They were very helpful in walking me thru the whole getting your site uploaded process. I downloaded Cuteftp to upload my pages to their site it was a free 30 day trial and was pretty easy (with some help from the net host) WHN has a forum to ask questions in and see what problems others have encountered. I guess some times things have to be rebooted on the hosting side and causes downtime to some websites but I have had this happen once so far. Anyone else have this problem with any of their hosts?
I don't know if this is the right forum for this but I will post my website addy at the bottom of this. It is a very very basic beggining site, I plan on adding much much more but what I am wondering is how it is balanced on others screens. Do the words line up with the pictures? Do all the button/links work? Is the site to dark/light? Would appreciate any input and if you want you can use my addy on the website to respond. Thanks so much and I will post in the right spot for review of the finished site when done. Thanks guys
Hours later I re- read my post..... maybe I should include the addy... http://www.pastandpresentphoto.com

[Vikki]

Looks very nice! Nice layout and color, and easy to navigate.
Only saw one oops. Your "slip" is showing on the bottom of your contact page.

[cendres]

Looks like your well on your way Jill, nice job. Not sure why the code is showing at the bottom of the contact page but thats easily corrected.

I have a monitor which is at 800 x 600 resolution and everything looks great and all the words seem to be where they should relative to the pictures. The font on your home page title is coming thru correctly. I have a problem on my website that some people, based on how their browser is set up, doesn't recognize the main font I use on my personal website. It defaults them to arial for some reason.

Since it is a business, you may want to investigate how best to register your domain name with some of the search engines so that people can find your website if they do a random search. I don't know that much about it, but I do know it doesn't happen to easily without registering with some of the main search engines.

Best of luck and good job - Carl

[Doug Nelson]

Very nice. Simple and elegant.

You've got a lot of blank tables at the bottom with a lot of empty space resulting. This is most likely not your fault. Publisher is a notoriously inefficient web editor. Before your site gets much more advanced you might want to consider a dedicated editor, like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Fusion, or Golive.

[jeaniesa]

Jill, I love it. Simple yet very well presented. By "simple" I don't mean "plain" or "simplistic", I mean "uncomplicated" and "easy to follow & understand." Very important for many users out there.

Hope you don't mind that I took a look at your source to try to figure out the "slip" on your contact page and the big blank spaces at the bottom of your pages. I don't know if you're comfortable editing the source text of your files, but if you are the two things are easy to fix.

1. On your contact page, look for the line that contains "cgi-sys". Then back up in that same line and find the characters "&lt;". Change those characters to a single "<". Now move towards the end of the line and find the characters "&gt;" and change those characters to a single ">". That should fix the "slip" problem.

2. Towards the bottom of every page you will find four lines that look something like:
<tr>
<td height=824></td>
<td colspan=8></td>
</tr>
Simply delete these lines as they are only adding space to the bottom of your pages. The space isn't that big of a deal really, but when I see a scroll bar in my browser window, I expect something to be down there and there isn't.

Hope this helps. You've done a great job - especially with Publisher. (I'm not sure I'd have the wherewithall to figure out how to do a webpage in Publsher. )

Jeanie

[Jill]

Thank you all for your responce
I will try Jeanie's idea to fix my "slip"!
I didn't know what to do with all that blank space so just left it! More to learn...phew
Thanks again!