Web sites offer great opportunities to explore your creative side, create a business presence or simply have a place to place your thoughts/pics etc to share with friends and associates.

If you want to get started to learn, I would start here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/ default.asp

They are a great resource for learning how to create web pages. It is really quite easy one you understand what all the tags mean. Tags are basically indicators that tell the text how to react when they are wrapped around them. So say you want to make the word "Awesome" in bold. You simply surround the word with strong tags like this:

<strong>Awesome</stro ng>

The / indicates the end of the bold. You can also use <b>Awesome</b> (B is obviously for Bold)

Learn all of the tags and they will help you create everything that you can create in a Word Document become a webpage.

Website hosting basics:
There are three things that you will need to host your own site.

1. You need to register a domain name. I use www.aplus.net because they are the cheapest around. ($5.95 / year)

2. You need someone to host your DNS records. A lot of web hosting companies do this for you but if you are hosting the site at your home you will need to set up a DNS host to basically tell everyone on the internet that www.jamy.com points to the IP address at your home or office. I use www.everydns.com and they are free.

3. If you do not have somewhere that can host it for free (Like your home or office) then you need to pay someone to host the actual web pages for you. www.discountasp.net is my favorite and least expensive I have seen ($9.95/month). You will need to then name the home page of your site to index.html or index.htm as that is the default home page for most web hosting companies. Once you get an account they will give you an FTP account so that you can upload images and pages to the host and "whala" you have a website.

Now this may seem like a lot of information but if you have patience and start simple you can build an informational website very easily and as you learn new concepts you can apply that one at a time and before you know if you will be doing it for all of your friends and family or maybe even do it for a living...however there's not that much money in websites, as every third person is a web designer.

Learn more about this author, Jamy Nigri.
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