Your Personal Websites - How?

[Keith Mullen]

After reading the resurrected thread on Chaser's List, and seeing just how many have their own personal / chase websites, I'm wondering how do you all manage to do so?

How simple and practical is the process of starting, operating, and maintaining your own websites these days?

Set-up?
Operation and Updating it?
Servers and software?

Thanks for your input.

Keith

 

[Jason Foster]

start with learning basic html. Things like the tags between the opening and closing carrots "<" ">". Know how to do the body, header, column, table, etc. tags.

After that look for a basic html editor. Create a few pages and then go look at the html code to learn more.

To start getting advanced, learning PHP and SQL is essential, not required. My site is very simple and I still use netscape composer for my pages. Take a look to see what simple editing can get you (website is my avatar address).

 

[Tyler Burg]

Depends on how much work you are willing to do, if you don't want to do much I'd suggest just doing a blog, all the content is super easy to manage with editors like blogspot.com and wordpress. If you are wanting to customize your site, it's going to take a lot of learning, reading and messing around with codes (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.) I did my entire site with html and css. But other than learning the code to display content you also need to have someone host your site, there are many hosts out there, hell there are even a few people on this forum that offer hosting services like drylinehosting.com operated my David Drummond I believe. You need to purchase a domain name as well, which isn't a big deal - an annual cost of $10. Hosting costs about $5 a month with 300GB bandwidth limit, which suits almost any amateur site...I've only come close to using all my bandwidth once. so figure a yearly cost of $70.

Really I just mess with code until I find something I like and develop it into a page. This is a good tool to use when first learning html. You type the code in the box on the left and click the "click and edit" button and it will display the result of the code you wrote. Hope this helps.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

The best way to do a website nowadays is to use a Content Management System. The 3 main CMS's are Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. I personally use Drupal on my site, and then Gallery for my photos.

David Drummond runs a hosting company which does low cost hosting on a Cpanel machine - Cpanel + fantastico is probably the best platform for the beginning. It is easy to click through and what not. You can find his hosting plans at www.DrylineHosting.com. If you don't want to go through him, there's a few others out there. You get what you pay for normally. David runs a pretty decent operation. Many of the members here have used him in the past, and I think you will find all positive reviews.

Once you pick out a CMS, the next thing to pick out would typically be the theme. This is going to alter how your site 'looks' (as a default Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla site will look very bland) and how it is setup. Once the theme is in place, you are ready to add content. Blog posts, pages, photos, etc.

I am more than willing to answer questions if you'd like. My day job involves this kind of stuff.

For an (shameless plug) example of Drupal + Gallery, feel free to check out my site http://www.benholcomb.com

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I started my website in 2003 (I think) manually coding HTML. I dabbled with Dreamweaver for a bit, but I found it easier to just manually code. My last big "overhaul" was back in 2005, when I converted quite a bit to PHP, and I moved my chase logs into a MySQL database. At that time, I created PHP scripts to add chase logs, etc. I now desperately need to update it in terms of styling and sophistication, and I'm sure moving to a tried-and-true CMS will make life much easier once I spend the time to customize CMS templates to my liking.

 

[Skip Talbot]

I made my webpage using Frontpage. Its very easy to use, you simply create the elements you want including pictures, tables, text and links, much like you would do in Word. You don't have to get into the HTML if you don't want to. I'm using Lunarpages for my hosting. Its $8 month, gives me more space than I'll ever need, and a bunch of features like blogging/message forums. Once you point Frontpage towards your site its simply a matter of writing onto your webpage and clicking save. Frontpage has been discontinued, however, so I recommend using something more modern like Dreamweaver or Expressions. Once you sign up with a web hosting company, they should have instructions on how to use different website designing software with their servers.

 

[James Langford]

I use smugmug for hosting my photography site, as well as my chasing logs. See here: http://www.langfordphotography.com/Storm-Chasing

I think they are around $50 a year for a basic account. You can use the site without doing any customizations if you want, but they do also allow a lot of options for changing things up using CSS.

James

 

[Shane Adams]

It's easy. WYSIWYG stuff with MS Expressions/Frontpage. $9.95/month for more space and bandwidth than I'll ever need. I've never been a "computer" guy, so code and spending hundreds of hours designing web graphics have never been a part of the website experience for me. Mine is just a simple image-n-text package designed to show what I've done.

Websites are becoming a novelty, with most people moving on to the "it's really a blog with a ton of links" type of webpage template. Others have completely gone away from it, with pure blogs, twitter, or social networking pages like Facebook as their exclusive route.

I like having a website because it's an online resume/record of my chasing activity. My site has always been plain-jane and simple, because it's a time capsule rather than a business. I only want to share with the world what I do and the things I've seen, and that doesn't require HTML code writing or a professional-style template full of blends, fades, and flash. My site is a lazy man's webpage.

Probably why I only average about 5 hits a day.

 

[Adam Lucio]

Im about as much of a tech tard as they come.

Ive been able to put together something somewhat decent using Drylinehosting's site builder which is primarily WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get.]

I would definitely recommend it for a beginner. As others have said it all depends what you want you're site to be. If all you want is a simple place to share chase logs a blog site would work fine. If you want a place where you can lump photos, videos, chase logs and other content then a website would be better.

Me personally Ive been trying to gear things all to one central location, logs, videos...i even switch my site into "live chase mode" when Im out on a chase. My homepage will be totally different and will show my streams and SpotterNetwork positions as opposed to what is normally on there [providing I dont' have issues in the field.]

Overall if its something you're interested in you will have fun tinkering around with stuff and learning...and when you get it to work the way you want it you will feel very accomplished. Good Luck! My site is below if you want to see what you can slap together with the above tools Ive mentioned.