Making my own website
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Bodaggit23
Active Member
There are many free hosting sites you can use, with general layouts already
installed.
Are you going to host it yourself and buy a domain?
installed.
Are you going to host it yourself and buy a domain?
tlarkin
VIP Member
If all you want to do is promote yourself and the site is all about the content I suggest you download and use a CMS and use a prebuilt theme. Then once that is installed and how you like it you just create content from with in the site.
Hosting it yourself is dumb, most ISPs block incoming port 80 anyway, and your upload bandwidth is nill. Just pay for hosting, I pay 9 dollars a month to host my site and I have unlimited everything, and 9 dollars a month? I waste more than 9 a month buying retarded crap, like muffins in the morning or a fountain drink in the afternoon or those expensive coffees or juice smoothies I sometimes drink.
Hosting it yourself is dumb, most ISPs block incoming port 80 anyway, and your upload bandwidth is nill. Just pay for hosting, I pay 9 dollars a month to host my site and I have unlimited everything, and 9 dollars a month? I waste more than 9 a month buying retarded crap, like muffins in the morning or a fountain drink in the afternoon or those expensive coffees or juice smoothies I sometimes drink.
i would suggest going to w3schools.org and learning XHTML and CSS, and practicing them by making layouts over and over again until it is second nature to you. also, read on the advantages and disadvantages of using CMS for your website. i think they are great for a lot of people, but aren't necessarily for everyone. you may be better off with a more static website designed and coded entirely by hand, it really just depends on what you want to accomplish with your website.
tlarkin
VIP Member
Why do you hate CMSes? I mean any good website is going to be database driven, and you can still custom design your site by hand but use the CMS on the back end to manage your content.
i don't hate them, i think they have the potential to take the internet to an all new level. designers without much experience can do things using them that would otherwise be impossible. that being said, i think that people should not immediately jump into using a CMS. a strong knowledge of XHTML/CSS should be a bare minimum for anyone looking to get into web design so that you at least have a solid foundation to branch out from. i meet people all the time that have websites of a pretty decent size and following who don't even understand the concept behind the box model. part of me thinks they aren't actually webmasters, but rather someone who installed a simple program onto an FTP and then started writing articles, and another smaller part of me thinks if they are able to get results and bypass all of the learning, more power to them. if the end result is the same, it's hard to know how to feel.
one thing i see CMS doing to web design is eliminating the need to learn languages like more traditional web work is done. if you want to start a site, people commonly say "download a CMS, install it, and learn how to use the interface". to me, that isn't web design. i started making sites around 2001 and at that time there was a huge fad called e/n sites where people would design graphics for, and code these extremely elaborate websites for no reason other than to show off their knowledge and get the respect of other people in the community. people took pride in using only notepad and a graphics program, and nothing else. the people that were making websites were extremely knowledgeable about what they were doing, and as a result a higher set of standards started to emerge and web design was almost an art form. blogging changed all that. i really am at war with myself because i can't decide my stance on it. the design and coding part is being eliminated entirely which allows more quality content to be made, which is obviously a good thing... on the flipside, webmasters nowadays commonly have no clue what they are doing. websites as a whole are changing and it's just going to take some getting used to.
maybe im just pissed because all of the hours of blood sweat and tears i put into learning everything i know about web design feels like it's all for nothing now
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tlarkin
VIP Member
i don't hate them, i think they have the potential to take the internet to an all new level. designers without much experience can do things using them that would otherwise be impossible. that being said, i think that people should not immediately jump into using a CMS. a strong knowledge of XHTML/CSS should be a bare minimum for anyone looking to get into web design so that you at least have a solid foundation to branch out from. i meet people all the time that have websites of a pretty decent size and following who don't even understand the concept behind the box model. part of me thinks they aren't actually webmasters, but rather someone who installed a simple program onto an FTP and then started writing articles, and another smaller part of me thinks if they are able to get results and bypass all of the learning, more power to them. if the end result is the same, it's hard to know how to feel.
one thing i see CMS doing to web design is eliminating the need to learn languages like more traditional web work is done. if you want to start a site, people commonly say "download a CMS, install it, and learn how to use the interface". to me, that isn't web design. i started making sites around 2001 and at that time there was a huge fad called e/n sites where people would design graphics for, and code these extremely elaborate websites for no reason other than to show off their knowledge and get the respect of other people in the community. people took pride in using only notepad and a graphics program, and nothing else. the people that were making websites were extremely knowledgeable about what they were doing, and as a result a higher set of standards started to emerge and web design was almost an art form. blogging changed all that. i really am at war with myself because i can't decide my stance on it. the design and coding part is being eliminated entirely which allows more quality content to be made, which is obviously a good thing... on the flipside, webmasters nowadays commonly have no clue what they are doing. websites as a whole are changing and it's just going to take some getting used to.
maybe im just pissed because all of the hours of blood sweat and tears i put into learning everything i know about web design feels like it's all for nothing now
I agree, but here is where I disagree. I have been in the IT field for a decade. I can pretty much fix anything hardware wise, and do almost any kind of configuration software wise and manage it massively. I know shell, apple script and some python, trying to learn perl. However, if I need something done on a serious level I am going to go to a software developer.
I know CSS and HTML a bit, and I built my own site from scratch and it does kind of look like crap and I do use a CMS. However, I am not a web developer.
It all depends on your higher end goals. If you want to design a site you should not have to go and learn everything unless you want to do it professionally.
If I tried to learn every aspect of IT for my career or anything I do outside of it, I would be in class all day every day long and never getting anything done.
Then on the other hand, when I import 6,000 users into LDAP over each summer I could sit there and write my own script by hand and know every aspect by it, or I can just use a GUI front end application that I plug a delimited spread sheet into and create import files for 6,000+ user accounts.
See this is where you are wrong. All your skills + a CMS allows you to be ridiculously efficient. I have a friend that just quit his job and started his own business and he is a web developer and he is a heavy drupal user. He can have a website up in minutes and he spends most of his time on the design aspect and then lets the CMS do everything in the background. This also allows him to easily maintain the site and update it, and then do that over and over again for 50 clients in a day to make some good cash.
xroadsempress
New Member
Some of the free-hosting sites that I have used (and still is using) is freehostia.
It is really user-friendly. You can check it out at www.freehostia.com:)
goodluck with your site.
It is really user-friendly. You can check it out at www.freehostia.com:)
goodluck with your site.
Bodaggit23
Active Member
I was just asking a question. Not everyone is as knowledgeable
as you in this area.
i wouldn't say it's dumb, it's just more of a hassle than it's worth. 15 dollars a month gets you all the hosting you could ever want. that's dirt cheap... i say pay the fifteen and let them have the headache
tlarkin
VIP Member
I was just asking a question. Not everyone is as knowledgeable
as you in this area.
Did not mean to direct that towards anyone, was just making a general statement. Let me extrapolate:
Many ISPs already block incoming port 80 requests. They do this on purpose because they do not want you hosting a site for free. The ISPs want you to upgrade to business class broadband if you are going to host your own sites. The one way around this is do some tricky port forwarding to another port, like port 8080. So, yes that will get you around that, but then you hit another snag. All broadband upstreams are throttled, big time. This, again is done on purpose, so that you will upgrade to the business class if you need fast upload speeds.
I will use my cable connection for example. I have a 20mbit down and 1mbit up connection (the upstream is a lie though) from Time Warner. My downloads are super fast and I can get over 1MB (that is one megabyte) per a second on my torrent client at times. However, my upload speed never really goes over 100k per a second. Take that in mind and then imagine a website with say, 10 users accessing it a lot. My measily 100K per a second upload speed will have huge performance hits. Now, this is also on my network, so that means that the bandwidth is shared amongst every computer on my network at home, including my xbox 360 and my Wii. So all of those devices also take up bandwidth when in use.
Then I have my website hosted from these guys:
www.phpwebhosting.com
9.95 per a month is a small price to pay for webhosting and they maintain the server not you, so that responsibility is off your back.
Learning how to program your own custom site takes a long time. So, if you are not interested in learning how to program or have little time to learn, I suggest you use a CMS (content management system).
CMS's allow you to create a new website and edit it without having any knowledge in programming.
Here is a CMS rating site that provides information on a number of open source CMS software: http://php.opensourcecms.com/
CMS's allow you to create a new website and edit it without having any knowledge in programming.
Here is a CMS rating site that provides information on a number of open source CMS software: http://php.opensourcecms.com/
tlarkin
VIP Member
Yes but like I have said before if you can code and use a CMS you can do all sorts of awesome high end stuff with little work since the CMS is already built in the background. Any good modern website is going to be database driven anyway.