Web Hosting Info

Having just content on its own can be rather boring. You may want to have more functions on your site other than content.

Some features of sites you may be interested in adding:

Newsletters
This is a great way of contacting your regular visitors easily and quickly. You can add a form on your site which guests enter their email to get a weekly/monthly newsletter. Benefits of a newsletter is that you can send them out for free and it reminds people about your site. However you don’t want to have your guests regarding your site as sending spam.

Scripts to Checkout;

http://www.phplist.com/  - Free

Forum/Messageboard 

Forums allow other users to post messages and intereact with you and other users. They can post additional information to your site and exchange ideas.  They connect users from all around the world who have similar interests. However forums are high maintenence and at first it is difficult to get alot of posts. Also they are targetted by spammers

Scripts to Checkout

http://phpBB.com - Free
http://punbb.org/- Free
http://vbulletin.com - Paid

I’ve used both phpBB and vBulletin and highly reccommend vBulletin if it is within budget.

Google page creator is a free online website maker from Google. It requires no HTML skills and features a WYSIWYG web based editor. They will also host your site as a sub-domain for example. yourname.googlepages.com.

After logging in to the site, you are presented with a Gmail like design. It lists all your pages and you can edit them, delete them or even tell your friends about them by emailing them from your Gmail account which is a nice feature.

There are 41 design templates and 4 layout templates available for you to choose from so you don’t even have to design anything. You can also switch between a design view and go to HTML.On other free services space is usually limited however Google allows you to have up to 100MB. Bandwidth at this time is unknown.

When creating a site it has a useful auto-save feature that automatically saves your site at regular intervals so if you close your browser by accident, you don’t loose all your work.

Unfortunately though you can not host your own domain name and you are limited to what you can do, you can not run advanced scripts on the service.

http://pages.google.com/

MORE4LESS OR itsadeal will get a discount off your order.

goox3004 at will get .com domains at $6.95

SAVETEN or gb1 will get 10% off a domain name order

If you don’t feel like learning HTML then it is great to use a WYSIWYG editor. These allow you to build web pages by showing you exactly what they will look like when they are viewed through a web browser.

There are several WYSIWYG editors avaliable for you to use, both free and paid;

Microsoft Frontpage

Frontpage was bundled with certain editions of Office 2003 and is easy to use. It has the same layout to other office products and therefore is easy to learn. You can switch from the default design view to a code view easily. It has since been replaced by Microsoft Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer. If you already own a copy of Microsoft Office you may already have a copy of front page.

Reccommended for: Personal Sites, 1st websites.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is an advanced web editor. It supports multipul web languages from HTML to visual basic. It can create dynamic websites, interacting with databases. Like frontpage is has the ability to switch between code view and a design view. It also adds another view which is a split between code and design. These features don’t come cheap and it is priced around $399

Nvu

Nvu is a free alternative to Frontpage and Dreamweaver and is avaliable on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is designed to be easy for novice users and requires not HTML skill. It includes a built in HTML validator to check HTML compliance.