Best Way to Make a Personal Website?

I have been thinking for awhile now about creating a personal website where I can do daily blogs, create albums of pictures, experiments, etc.

I am want it to be my own little interwebs man cave. I am just wondering if anyone knows where a good place to start might be. I would prefer something free, but I think I will probably end up needing a url name and a hosting site.

Any advice helps, never made a website before.
Thanks,
Isaac

I've set up a few. It really depends how technically savvy you are (html, css etc.) and how much you want to spend.

Godaddy will work for a domain name/url, kind of necessary if it's a serious thing. Not terribly expensive. Maybe $70 for 2 years not too bad. they do offer some basic hosting, but it sounds like you'd want something a little more.

If your comfortable with some website basics like writing up your own html and uploading with FTP, I use reversenet $5 a month and Matthew is awesome. They are Hacker friendly and know what they're doing security wise.

If it's just more of a blog, fun kind of thing it might be easier to just create a Facebook page and redirect your domain name to that address once you have it done (not hard). You could also just save yourself the cost of a buying a domain and just use the Facebook page addy.

Might be the easiest unless you have some time and coding abilities. I'm terrible with code and always have trouble getting pages to be cross-platform compatible.

Should be cool :beer:

~ LB

You'll need to buy a domain if you want to make your own site with a .com or .org or whatever. If you want to set up a blog through blogspot or a similar service you won't need to do that but your url will end in domainname.blogspot.com (this is the same for most if not all free domains). Godaddy is pretty cheap, I can buy them for about $1 for a year with coupons for a domain name. I haven't used any other service but there are probably better alternatives. Hosting is the main problem. I believe once you buy a domain you can also go through blogspot to host your site for free (not 100%) and there are limitations as to how you can set up your site. You can buy hosting too, but that's not cheap. I've used hostgator and they are excellent, but they cost a bit of money, but there are also coupons floating around for a free month and so on. ALWAYS LOOK FOR COUPONS if you're buying something. There are other paid options, but I haven't looked into them as much. And there are free hosting sites too, like webs.com, but they have changed a lot and I don't know much about them anymore. Free hosting usually isn't as good and sometimes puts mandatory ads on your site. If you go the free route you can experiment with some different services.

Hope that helps!

Like Stin said, if you just want a site to randomly throw up blog posts and pics, you'd probably be better off just getting an account on one of those blogging sites. You don't have to set anything up yourself, and it's easy to use. Coding your own blogging system is a pain in the ass and time consuming.

What about google sites? Like the one DTR uses? I think there have been some members here with those as well. Just wondering if they are easy and reasonably priced.

Thanks for all the advice guys!
-Isaac

Google sites are free and are relatively easy to set up. Haven't done one in a few years, but it shouldn't be all that hard to get going.

Edit: I'd actually recommend either setting up a google sites page or a blogger page, and see how that works out and if you want to get more advanced, go for it. See how those sites suit your needs for now and test the water. I don't think they come any more basic than those. And the nice thing is they are both linked to your google account.

Hi you can contact many of the freelance website designer who have uploaded their work on the internet and if you want then you can contact companies also. You will have ample amount of options in terms of different choices. Take smart step choose the one, which can give you good design within your budget.

Google sites is free and easy but doesn't really offer a professional or man cave feel as it's very..."Googlish". I own a hosting company with another guy. We can give you a domain and very good hosting for a good price. PM me if you're interested

You will need the following
1. Domain name - upto 10$/year
2. Hosting space - 5$/month or 3$/month if you pay in advance for a basic plan from any big name sites. you do not need any dedicated server unless you are talking about millions of page views
3. Content Management system - Wordpress or Joomla is your best bet

CMS systems are easy to install, and once installed, its all push button stuff.

Process is something like this
1. Your hosting provider gives you directory location where you will extract CMS package
2. You access CMS control panel(first time) - Set up passwords and accounts
3. You delete some "allow access to all files"
4. After that its content creation. Its just like making a forum post

Many beginners love wordpress. If you use wordpress, most hosting providers give you a pre installed wordpress account.
If you want something advanced, joomla is good.


For very advanced users drupal is great, but stay away for now.

Do not bother with web developers CSS HTML etc., CMS systems are easily scalable.

Typically, expect to spend around 50-60$/year for domain name + hosting space

Joomla, LOL!