Beginner building web site question

I am a township trustee here in Ohio (Carrol county/Brown twp) and built the townships first website---no previous experience. Used Go Daddy and Word Press. Watched several YouTube videos on subject first.
www.browntwp-carrollco.org

Web sites can be fun to do and also can turn into a lot of work, if done correctly. Before a person jumps into the water of building a site, they need to ask themselves some questions. What info do they have that they wish to share with others? Who will be their target audience?, family?, the general public? a small group of the public, such as RV travelers?, etc.

Is the web site going to be mainly used to disseminate information or to sell products and/or services, etc. Many site developers recommend doing a rough paper outline of what you want your site to look like and how it will be organized. How will photos, if any are used, be grouped, etc.

There are many free services available out there and many paid for services available. Many business web pages are built and maintained by a professional web page designer. I have a nephew in Portland that does this for a living and specializes in certain types of businesses. He mainly uses a program called "Dream Weaver" as his starting platform for most of the sites he creates. But his clients pay dearly for his services. LOL

I have had a web site now for just over 10 years, perhaps a few years more. Over this time I have changed "hosts", changed authoring software, changed screen names, etc. Lots of good advice being given above, and it would be worthwhile to take a look at the web sites they have personally developed. I started out using a Microsoft product called Frontpage 2000, then MS came out with a better version called Frontpage 2003. Then MS appears to have lost interest in any additional development in this type of software and 2003 is the last and most up to date version available. However I keep using it, as it is what my site is built around. I first came up with the idea of a web site to be able to share mainly photos with the extended family of mine and my wife. Soon it became more travel oriented and aimed toward RVing.

It is easy to neglect the web site once it is up and running, I have found. I need to go through mine and purge a lot of "junk" I put in it ten years ago. On my desk top I have a trip report of last summers RVing in the mountain west, that I have been messing with for the last six months. I appear to have lost some interest in the site, not at all uncommon, it would seem. LOL

I use a monthly pay, web hosting business, called Justhost.com, located in Salt Lake City. Started using them when my previous host "forgot" to let me know my screen name was needing to be renewed, so I lost it. There are companies that pick up recently expired screen names and try to sell them back to the former owner at a much higher price. So I just reversed the order of my wife and my initials and re-registed the new name of our site as it currently stands. Since that time I found my old name was available again as the company was never able to sell it to anyone and they dropped it.
Watch where the servers are located as well of your host company. I had been with a host company for three or four years before I found the servers were physically located in the Ukraine and the home office was in Amsterdam, my credit card charges went through a company in London. Not any problems other than when I needed to talk to a person about my web site. That company was sold and ended up with their servers in Salt Lake City Utah area. Much better to actually be able to talk to the people in the same building with the servers.

Some basis thoughts, such as the 8 second rule mentioned above, which is less important these days with more people using faster connections to get on the Internet. One that I try to watch, is before I put anything new on my site, remember, that just because something happened to you, doesn't make it of interest to anyone else automatically. Somewhat like the "vanity" books some people write and publish about how smart their dog or grandchild is or can do. Just not of any interest to me, as I know my dog is much smarter and better looking. For most of us, a web site that focuses on "us", probably isn't going to get bookmarked on very many other computers.

We all put a lot of work into our sites, so make sure it is properly backed up, often. Make sure your host servers are being backed up, on a regular basis. Get on your host site and run analysis of your site, how many views, from where, how long is your longest page taking to load, I have one that is taking 28 seconds, but it is one of "family" interest only, and none of the family uses dial up anymore, so not a problem, so to speak.

There are many ways to build a website these days. The most basic language being HTML and coding straight into HTML.

However, in my experience, once you learn that, it makes learning other things more difficult because the syntax is completely reversed or changed around.

You can dabble in design concepts using online tools like web.com, squarespace.com and google sites.

If you have a google account already, start there. The google sites is actually not to bad and it is free.

I started by learning HTML, uploaded the files for each page to my ISP. GoDaddy works if that's the way you want to do it.

That was before there were any dedicated editors, interaction tools like Flash, JAVA, XTML or ActiveX, let alone web authoring tools in word processors or drag and drop build your own tools provided. For something simple, you can compose what you want in Word and save as HTML. I you want more action on the screen, you can buy tools to build Flash programs.

At a completely different level, most places that offer "personal page" hosting have online editing tools to create simple things that look good, and nothing has to be done on your own computer. It all gets done on their site. So many tools you'll have trouble selecting one. But it really doesn't matter which one, if it works for you.

Where to go depends on what you want to do, so look at the terms of service. People build sites to blog, to share their interests, to rake in money. Different hosts and different tools for different functions. Many things can be hosted free, others for a few dollars a month, but hosting a high-traffic web business will cost some more money.

A lot of people are building pages on social media sites today, as an alternative to web pages. Others express themselves in places like YouTube.

Start by reading:
"How I Learned to Write HTML and still retain a small degree of sanity."

Then download and print "Wilbur."

When you have digested all of that read "The HTML Guru".

One thing that has been forgotten or ignored) is the Eight Second Rule -
"When using a 28.8Kb dial up connection, a page should be downloaded and rendered in under eight seconds."

If you haven't done so already . . . buy your own domain name. You can do this at GoDaddy.com for about $15. Sometimes they have specials for much less.

When you register it, put yourself as contact person for ALL choices. Then YOU own it and can control it forever. Sometimes when you get your domain name through a company that provides web site hosting, they register themselves as the contact person and then hold your domain name hostage to try to force you to stay with them.

When you own your domain name, you should be able to use it on any web hosting site.

Weebly.com. No hassles, easy to use interface to build a site. If you can use a word processor you can built a site - works exactly the same way. It is free and you get a simple URL. If you want to put your own URL on the site - obtained from anywhere - the site will walk you through attaching the URL - simple and easy.

Don't be overwhelmed. Try weebly. Take it slow and you can come back as much as you want and edit, add, or delete. And it is free. I have used many similar sites including webs and this is the easiest to use and get professional looking results. I just moved my wife's sewing club's site to weebly from webs because webs was suspending the site because they said it had objectionable content. No one is quite sure what is objectionable about needle and thread. Webs claimed it was a glitch on their end but it happened weekly. So that site came down and now they have a nice new site on weebly and it was finished and up in less than a half hour.

path1 wrote:
If you've built a web site lately where would you recommend a newbie start?

I've built one from scratch.

If you want to actually learn how to code in HTML, right-click anywhere on this page (in Chrome it works) and select "View page source."

That'll blow your mind.

I use GoDaddy for hosting. They have all the tools there. Be patient, it's going to take time.

Thanks everybody...

When I goggled "building a website" Results were over whelming.

Reminded me of buying computer for first time. Everybody seemed to say that, the was best was (of course) what they were pushing.

Didn't want to put in a bunch of time in and find out I couldn't move domain name from host or be locked into what they were selling.

path1 wrote:

If you've built a web site lately where would you recommend a newbie start?

You can build a great looking web site in a few minutes using Wix. No computer or programming skills required.

http://www.wix.com/

Bill