Starting a website (Questions).

I want to start a dot_com site sometime in the next few months. I have already reserved the domain name via go.daddy.com. I understand that the next step would be hosting and building the site.

1) Should I host via go.daddy or are there better options?
2) What other things do I need to know? For example, best resources (books/websites) on how to build a website, most affordable ways to do so, etc...

Any help in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

And yes, in case anyone was wondering, it's going to be about beer.
__________________________________________________

Thanks,

Jess

The first thing is the name.

Is it just about beer?
Is going to be used for other things?
Is it commercial or personal?
If it's personal do you want the option to go pro?

I have the name already.

The main focus is going to be beer and brewing. It is not going to be a combination of commercial beer/brewing and homebrewing. For anyone who might have concerns, it is NOT a competition site for HBT or anything like that at all. In fact I will do nothing but support this site when I discuss the best resource for homebrewing.

As far as business/moneymaking, the farthest I have thought is some logo items on zazzle and probably some hosted ads to start with. I honestly would like to generate some revenue with the site, but I'm not expecting it to be a full-time business at this time.

I'm looking at starting with a free Google Blog to see if I get any interest in my concept and wanted to have the dot_com domain available in case I decide to expand. There are alot of beer sites out there, and I don't think I have anything that hasn't been done before, but I think the format of my site will be a bit unique.

It depends how much you want to customize the site. The simplest way to start is a freebie blog site (no hosting fee's etc) or you can get a basic hosting package somewhere - you should be able to find something for ~$10/month or less) and find an opensource blogging system or something like phpnuke or dotnetnuke (depending on the language you would want to work with).

If you go the hosting route with your own software package you can customize all you want, if you go with a blogging service you're much more restricted in what you can do with it.

I use bluehost and powweb for hosting; and gotta say bluehost is easy and user friendly if thats what you're looking for.

nealf said:

I use bluehost and powweb for hosting; and gotta say bluehost is easy and user friendly if thats what you're looking for.

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I definately need easy and user friendly, I'll take a look at the sites you recommended.

godaddy is as user friendly as they come and very reasonable to boot. I spend $6 per month and have more bandwidth and storage space than I know what to do with. (1.5G storage & 150G bandwidth as well as space for 25 MySQL Dtabases)

Currently I just use Wordpress for a blog as the main page w/ the brewblogger software that I use as my brewlog. Both are quite customizable, although Wordpress has a huge community of developers for just about any plugin/widget you could hope for. It is written in PHP and that alone allows for easy customization of anything you can't find elsewhere.

nealf said:

I use bluehost and powweb for hosting; and gotta say bluehost is easy and user friendly if thats what you're looking for.

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I used to use powweb, but their service was always terrible. Took a week one time for them to fix an ftp problem for me to login to my site. I recommend site5.com cheap for what you get.

As for where to start, I also suggest just setting up a blog-style page, using Wordpress or the like. Or if you really want to get into the coding side you could try http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/ or search Google for HTML help.

I'm not the coding type. I am sure I could figure it out, but I'd rather stick with the basics. Thanks for the advice so far.

McKBrew said:

For anyone who might have concerns, it is NOT a competition site for HBT or anything like that at all. In fact I will do nothing but support this site when I discuss the best resource for homebrewing.

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Phew! I was reading the thread, and until you mentioned that part, all I could think of was, What will become of HBT with a new competitor out there? Will he shut us down outright, or allow us to continue to go on in some reduced capacity?

For what you are proposing godaddy and the tools they have are a good start. Their email is slower than a dead pig, though.

html034 said:

Phew! I was reading the thread, and until you mentioned that part, all I could think of was, What will become of HBT with a new competitor out there? Will he shut us down outright, or allow us to continue to go on in some reduced capacity?

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No way in hell I am going to compete with HBT. This place rocks. Because I don't want to go into great detail about what I am doing (mostly because I don't know what I am doing ), and I said the site is beer related I just wanted to make sure I didn't risk losing any assistance because someone might feel that they are supporting a potential competitor. Esp since there have been a couple of former HBT members that went out and started their own forum.

The advice so far has been good, and I will probably go with Go Daddy as it makes sense for someone like me who has no website experience at all.

I'm a control freak when it comes to my own sites, so I don't trust anyone to host them except myself.

As to a host, however, the specifics of what you plan on doing might affect what host to look for. GoDaddy is a very financially stable company which means something... Aquisitions are extremely common in the web-hosting world. I've had some GREAT webhosts in the beginning be purchased by asshats and end up screwed. That happened with Doorhost, i vehemently recommend avoiding them.

That said, GoDaddy is a bit high on price though it's still really reasonable, at around $6 for their basic hosting. This is per site per domain per month, so if you plan on extending out and adding domains within the next year, it MIGHT make sense to factor that into the host you have now, since moving is a pain in the butt especially if you get a host that isn't fond of you leaving.

Also, what you're planning on doing as far as content is important. You mentioned the idea of a Google blog... If that's all you're doing, it is possible to point your domain name to the blog, so that yourdomain.com points to your content, no hosting needed. If you'd rather install your own blog (say, to add customized themes, plugins and ads) then you're going to need hosting.

And finally, please, please, please, please, please... if one thing in this thread changes your worldview, it's this... Backup your site. Yourself.

http://www.monochromementality.com/...Site-Broken-Articles-And-Learning-Python.html

I had a server with redundant RAID which creates a statistical chance in hell of something being totally destroyed. I also kept snapshots of my server with my host and updated the backup I had on my home fileserver but unfortunately I'd neglected it for a few months.

When one hard drive failed, the company I'm with rushed in to replace the bad drive, which wasn't interrupting my service since the other was functional - a common occurance. As the one drive was restoring it's mirrored buddy, it too failed, which is a statistical blip in and of itself. And I learned that the snapshots were stored on the same server... So my site was entirely gone and I was left restoring from a combination of my 3 month old backup (can you imagine loosing 3 months of HBT's posts?) and Google Cache.

So back. Your. Stuff. Up.

McKBrew,
give me a yell if you want. I used to do web applications development for a living,
and still do some work on the side. I am always open to helping a fellow homebrewer
with a project, even more so when it is a fellow webfooted washingtonian.

Kevin Dean said:

You mentioned the idea of a Google blog... If that's all you're doing, it is possible to point your domain name to the blog, so that yourdomain.com points to your content, no hosting needed.

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How would I go about doing this?

McKBrew said:

How would I go about doing this?

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Once you buy your domain from GoDaddy (or whoever you end up choosing) they should have an option in your SuperDuperWeRockGoDaddyUserControlPanel(tm) to forward the domain to another url. I think with GoDaddy you just log into "Domain Management," click on "Forward" and type in your blogger.com address.

Two words"

iweb
.mac

Couldn't be easier or cheaper. Look into it

One more thing, if you did register with godaddy they do have a free basic hosting package so you can at least get a feel for what tools they offer.

I use Hostrocket, they have everything open to you including all database options etc, domain forwarding, stats etc etc. They are cheap too I am paying I think 10 a month. A friend of mine wanted to have a business web site so I told him I would make it for him as a favor, well half way through the project he took off to another state and seemed like he lost interest so work on it halted. I used Adobe Dreamweaver + Sunshop for the web site: Santafestyleart.com

The site is built with Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) and read up on htmlgoodies.com they are a great start/help/cheatsheet for html when you get going. I recomend you search google and find a CSS template. There are tons of free ones out there BTW. You don't need to use this for your final site but they are the easyest way to look at the code of a website using(CSS) and you can tweak numbers and parameters and see what happens. Also if you see a site layout you like take a look at the source code and copy it in your site and see how it fits(remember not to steal any graphics or rip the whole site design without autho consent).

I recoment you get yourself a pro web design program such as Dreamweaver. The site builders included with hosting plans are usually very limited and you will soon find you are spending a ton of time coding things the editor dosen't offer. Dreamweaver checks the code, has input boxes for sizes and parameters, and does a lot of the basic functions for you. Your workflow will be 4x as fast.

Also stay far far away from Yahoo hosting they lock down their database capabilites unless you pay them a ton extra. make sure you find a host that has lots of capabilities open to you.

McKBrew said:

How would I go about doing this?

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For Google's Blogger - http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373

Of course, there's a ton of blogging services out there, all of the major ones will offer the same thing, and typically have pretty easy-to-follow instructions on their "Help" pages.

sorry for the hijack.. but does anyone else have a website for their brewing? I have seen a few with them in their sigs like me, but i cant remember them.. I am up for adding some peoples websites onto my friends page.

btw, i am hosted through pearserve.com and used wordpress to design..

For hosting I can recommend 1and1.com, but I haven't tried the others mentioned here. I just know I am satisfied and their rates are definitely reasonable...

Thanks for the continued advice. Pointing my .com to my google blog was a piece of cake. I figure I'll run the blog as the website until around tax refund time next year and then transfer to the .com domain as my primary site. Once I have some content on the site I'll post the link.

Nothing really to add here except another recommendation for Godaddy. I have been using them for 6 years, never one single problem.

I've been using Godaddy too. Google around for coupon codes. I ended up signing up for 3 years for like $60.

I had to call support once, and immediately got a person that wasn't in India.