How to make a DECENT site (not one of those myspace pieces of crap)

Right, there’s two ways you can go about this, the free way and the cheap way. I would recommend the cheap way, but it’s up to you. Ill start with the Free way and then move onto the cheap way.

**note - youll have to go down to the bottom to get to the nav for some reason **

The Free Way.

Now you’re first going to need yourself a host. When you’re hunting through the net, here’s a few things to look out for:

• PHP – it is possible to make a site without this, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to do with it.
• High bandwidth – Bandwidth is how much space you have each month, basically if you have a 1g file and 5g bandwidth a month, then if 5 people download that file, you’re out of space for the month.
• Free web space – Your going to be storing ALL your files here, so the more the better J
• Large/no file size limit – don’t be fooled into the “unlimited web space!” trick, these sites normally only allow a very small file size, meaning you will have to compress everything, not good.
• Free MSQL database – this isn’t a must, but you can do a huge amount with it.

That should about cover it. Just to give you a helping hand, the following sites should have what you need. Please note I haven’t tried them, so I’m going on what other people say;

http://www.zendurl.com/

http://www.awardspace.com/free_web_hosting.html

http://www.phpnet.us/

Right, no I’m presuming that these things will give you a domain, be it www.free.com/yourname or what ever.

Now a fair few people don’t like having the sub domain, and there is something you can do about that. Get on over to

http://www.dot.tk/en/index.html

basically this is a forwarding service, you put in your “Free.com/me” address and it will give you a www.yourname.tk address. The only downside is that there are people saying that they can’t view .tk sites, it’s up to you whether you take the risk.

Ok, so we now have hosting and a domain name, excellent J

Time to move onto making the site itself.

Now this is where you really need to do the “Cheap” way, but ill try to figure out a free approach for you to.

If your host has MSQL databases, skip all this and head down to “Doing it with MSQL”

You’re going to need an art package. By that I mean something along the lines of Adobe Photoshop. If you have this, great!, if you don’t, don’t fret, there are alternatives!

There is a program called GIMP (I didn’t name it, don’t ask ) that is basically a free art package. I have never used it and so can’t help you a great deal, id suggest google-ing something along the lines of “tutorial website in gimp”.

I’m afraid I am going to have to go into the Photoshop side of doing this, purely because it is all I have experience in.

So, you’re going to want to make a site that looks something like this:

The banner on top, nav underneath, one big bit for text and a footer. Now obviously you can make changes to this, the main thing is that you have a big bit in the middle for text.

Now cut each part and paste into a new file. That is, cut the banner out and save that in it own file as either a JPEG or a GIF, no BMP’s or other random stuff, stick to the first two. You’ll need to cut out each button on the nav bar separately, the main bit for text and the footer. Id also recommend making a background image (more covered in “Final Tips and Tricks”.

So you now should have any where from four to maybe ten images, all saved as separate things.

Right, time to crack open some HTML.

If you have something like Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage, or anything like that, great, open it up and get ready. If not, open wordpad and when your done, save it as a html file.

This code will be for my example image, it’s easy enough to understand and ill take you through it, so feel free to change it for your own needs.

This will be a great deal easier if you’re using a proper HTMl editor instead of wordpad, but ill try my best to explain.

The A’s are purely there because in dreamweaver, if there is nothing in the cells then they have a nasty habit of disappearing, you will need to delete them.

Where it says “nav 1-4”, “main text”, “footer” and “your banner file”, these are the image files that you created.

Now some hosts screw this up when you upload, so it might be worth uploading your images and actually taking the direct link for the backgrounds. In English, that’s taking

www.free.com.mysite/banner.jpeg

and putting that as the background file, some hosts will do this automatically for you, some wont, but it’s a pain to do once you get into more complicated sites heh.

The “height=”xxx” and likewise with width are the height and width of the images, not the cells.

Just realised I forgot to say this, to keep things simple we are going to add the links in HTMl, so when you make your nav bar images, don’t put any text on them

So, in the space of “nav 1” where it says A, select the A and delete it. Type in Home and select that.

If you’re using wordpad then skip straight to this

Go to the code editor bit of your program and type in where it says home:

www.free.com/index.html”>HomeThis tells the site that this text when clicked will take us to the home page.I would also add some form of copyright on the footer, anything along the lines of “All content unless otherwise stated copyright © yoursite name 2006”

Right, with that done its time to save your work. Save often because believe me, it’s a bitch to lose 2 hours work J

Save this file as Index.html it is your homepage and so MUST be called index.

Time to bring in the PHP

Go to this site  http://cutephp.com/ and install the latest version of cute news. I’m not going to go into how to do this, there are plenty of tutorials on that site.

Now you’ll need to put your cutenews code,(again, I’m not going into it, follow the stuff on there site) into the main text area.

Ok, save and upload everything to your host. Ill presume you know how to do this, again, there are probably tutorials on your hosts site. If not, ask on there forums

Time to check your work.

Once you’ve uploaded, go to your file, it should be either www.free.com./mysite or something along those lines, there is probably a button saying “view page”.

There should be the default post from cutenews up and running

If not, well I honestly can’t help you to much, this entire thing basically revolves around cutenews, id ask on there forums and check if you’ve set it up correctly.

If it worked, great!

Now to save time, go into the folder (on your PC, not on your host) and duplicate index.html once for ever page you intend to have, so in our case we would need 3 more. Rename them with the pages you are going to have, so lets say Pictures.html AboutMe.html (don’t use spaces, if you really must use a underscore) and Music.html.

Now go back into the index file and add the nav code, for those that are to lazy to scroll up,

www.free.com/index.html”>HomeExcept it would now be /pictures.html”>PicturesGo along and do this for all the buttons, in all the files.

Upload it all.

Go into cutenews and make 4 different categories, home, pictures, about_me and music (obviously name them for your pages) and set those categories up for each page. Once again I am NOT going into this, there are plenty of tutorials on there site.

Put some content up!

Congratulations, you now have your own site

It would have been a great deal better if you had either forked out a few £ or got a MSQL host, but meh, its there

Using MSQL

Well done, you found a host that’s free, allows PHP AND! Has MSQL, that was the first and probably greatest decisions you’ll ever make to do with your website

Go to http://wordpress.org/ and download and install it onto your webspace. This is actually quite tough to do and I would advise getting help off the forums if you don’t know what you’re doing. I will own up to not actually setting up my MSQL stuff, someone I know does it for me

Right, you now basically have your site.

Wordpress is absolutely amazing, get on over to http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/themes.php and get a decent theme, there are normally instructions on how to install it with the theme. If you want you can even edit the images in Photoshop, or some other program like it

You could even get some mods, to put film, photo albums, music, anything onto your site from http://www.wp-plugins.net/

And the best bit is, because it’s a blog it couldn’t be easier to update

As you have probably guessed, Phrost is run off Wordpress with some custom graphic changes and a few mods heh.

So there you go, your own site, free. The MSQL one is by far better and with the right mods believe me, outdoes any piece of myspace shit.

Now, onto the way to REALLY do it

The Cheap Way.

Now lets just set one thing straight, by “cheap” I mean about £50 a year. Now this does sound a lot, and I would most definitely recommend using a free service for a month or two BEFORE shelling all that money out, just to be sure that you like what you see.

I can personally recommend 1&1 hosting. It is what phrost runs on, I think in the year or 2 that its been running its been down for maybe a day or two, has great technical support and a shed load of features that can make your life A LOT easier. They can be found here:

http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/Hosting;jsessionid=C354BED42E7FF08427305595B94F7361.TC33a?ac=OM.UK.UK529K03386T2650a&PID=1556549

If you’re going with them and you want to use wordpress (id recommend it) then you’ll have to go with the £8 one. If you don’t want to spend that much, then id go with this site here:

http://www.omnis.com/webhosting_windows.php

the windows PLUS option has all you need and works out at £4.80 a month.

You’re also going to need a domain, 1&1 comes with a free one, but if you go with another site then you’ll need to register it. It doesn’t really matter where you register it, but shop around and get a good price, you can get .co.uk for about £2 and .com for anything around £10-£20

A word on domain names, think long and hard on a name because once you choose it, it’s with you for a few years.

Make spider diagrams of words that sound good, make sure it’s roughly relevant to your content (Yes I know Phrost has nothing to do with the content ), the following was some ideas I did before arriving at Phrost.

So you now have your hosting and your domain, congratulations!

And don’t worry, you can make back enough to cover most of that hosting bill easily in the course of a year

Now you’ll want to read up in the “Free Way” of either how to make a site using PHP alone or using MSQL (much better).

 

Final Tips and Tricks

A few things I’ve picked up over the years;

• Making Money – This could not be easier, ill say straight off to use Google Adsense, unless you live in the US in which case use Yahoo Ads. Simply stick them up and you’ll happily make around £30 - £100 a year, even with a small site J adsense can be found here:
  https://www.google.com/adsense/
• Forums – If your going to have forums, don’t get the shitty free ones, take the time to get some proper ones (Powered by PHPBB, id recommend) installed, make, modify and get a custom theme THAT FITS INTO YOUR SITE and get a few mods. Points systems, RPG mods, shop mods, these all go down well
• Content – Don’t steal content from other peoples sites, make your own or just put links, you can and probably will be taken to court otherwise J
• Updates – If you don’t update, your site will fail, it’s as simple as that.
• Background images – don’t make them any bigger than about 8×8, they can just tessellate and cover your entire back page J
• Content 2 – People love anything sick, funny or strange, learn from this ^-^
• Flash Portals DON’T take off, don’t attempt to make one.
• Tutorials bring in a lot of people
• If all else fails when designing, steal some other sites design lol

Well there you go, id say that about covers it

Please note – apart from 1&1, I can’t actually vouch for any of the sites, I’m just going on what features they offer.

Well there you go, with a bit of work you can have a site that’s bringing in the bucks in no time

Hope you enjoyed this, it was written by LewisM of Phrost and should not be seen any where else, if you are reading this on a different site then please email me lewis.m[at]blueyonder.co.uk with the address it is on.

Also, if you have any troubles with this, feel free to mail me to

Thanks, hope you learned something, Have fun!