Designing a webpage

[JohnsonM]

Hey everyone,

I've been reading around the forums and around this site in general and I have come to the conclusion that it would be a really great idea to design a website where I can write and post some of my work and ideas. I've only dabbled in web design and I wouldn't exactly say that the person who taught me did a very good job at it or was good and designing websites themselves. So here I am requesting some help on designing a webpage. I'm wondering if any of you know a good site I can go to that can give me this information. I also wonder if I need to pay to put my site up once it's designed, or are there free domains that are really good?

If you think that there is another way to post my work without designing my own site that would be better then I would love your feedback. Any help will do really. Thanks ahead of time for all the info.

[Adrir]

I would definitely reccomend getting independent hosting and an independent domain name. It looks professional and makes it seem like you're serious about breaking in. It's also very easy to reference in a resume or covering letter and can suppliment your application in a very powerful manner - especially when you include elements that may be interesting for an employer but too broad for a traditional resume and covering letter. Just be careful to keep buisness seperate from personal!

Hosting a website is very cheap in this day and age. You don't need a fancy company for a small website so virtually any cheap reliable host will do! Personally, I pay about £15 per year to run my website and I rolled my own content management system. A wordpress blog is a popular free choice too for content management if you are not a programmer - plus it is free.

The design itself doesn't have to be anything fancy. My website looks horrible, but it get's the point across. I'm not an artist! A good series of tutorials are available for free at W3Schools across a wide range of topics including markup languages, server scripting languages, browser scripting languages and multimedia. There is also a very good article about the demo portfolio that could give you some ideas on how to properly format your website.

I hope this helps!

[JohnsonM]

Originally Posted by Adrir

I would definitely reccomend getting independent hosting and an independent domain name.

Explain this...this is gibberish to me.

[Adrir]

domain name = the name of your website, ie. myname.com
hosting = the server the site is hosted on

Independent meaning not a free service.

You would need to secure hosting with someone and then register the domain name with a domain name registrar. Generally I keep the two seperate (seperate hosting company and seperate domain registrar) because some hosting companies will provide "free" domain names but will often actually keep the ownership of those domain names themselves.

[JohnsonM]

Thanks for clarifying Adrir. If I could give you positive feedback I promise I would.