Over the years I've dabbled with html & css code, wrestled unsuccessfully with a home-hosted FTP, toyed with Dropbox, exploited LinkedIn, engaged forums, authored a carbonmade website, and discovered Tonido... but I've never really settled on what I want to do for my "web life".

Yesterday I was made redundant.

It dawns on me that I really should get a website up and running. My free carbonmade http://kierenporter.carbonmade.com/) site has been sufficient as a "teaser" portfolio to accompany my CV - but it's really not enough. I also have grander designs for my "online presence" - I'm thinking a blog, a gallery, etc.... the most recent site I've found that matches what I'm thinking is http://www.syedrezaali.com/blog/

I have decided as much as I would love to code the site - I haven't the time to learn another software/skill - so need to work with a template-style / WYSIWYG method. (Word Press?) - that or I task my cousin with the job - he knows his stuff, but is trying to make a go as an independant, so I don't want to take the pi55.

But beyond that I've no idea what to do next? As in, I guess the question is how do I actually get a website? (I know I could google this, but that's generic advice)
Do I get multiple sites (for each aspect) or one "over-arching"site?
Do I get email functionality with a site? Other than my blackberry - I imagine I'd then need a mail client on my Win7 computer yes?
When I'm writing "site" should I really be writing "domain" ? What's the difference?
What kind of storage (typical) for what kind of money (typical) am I looking at?
Can I have a "&" in a website/domain name?

Questions... Questions...

OK, yes I agree, having a proper website is definitely the way forward.

I just signed up yesterday with http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk/

There are two main parts to getting a website. The domain name (i.e. keirenporter.com or whatever) and then the hosting (i.e. the space on a server that your domain name points to). This combined together forms the "site" (I suppose).

Most hosting companies (like the one I linked) will have various packages that will pretty much always offer similar things to every other host.

The Pro Host package I have gone for gives me...
5GB of online space
100 mailboxes (i.e. oliver@oliverfoggin.com, help@oliverfoggin.com, info@oliverfoggin.com etc...)
10 subdomains (i.e. blah.oliverfoggin.com, myappwebsite.oliverfoggin.com, myblogwebsite.oliverfoggin.com etc...)
10 MySQL databases (for use with PHP if you want to do it yourself or with a CMS like WordPress or Joomla etc...)
Plus all the usual stuff like FTP access and so on.

I get all that for £25 a year plus I needed to pay to register my domain name oliverfoggin.com and that was £6 but I only need to do that once.

If you want a blog type thing then the thing you need to look for is the MySQL and PHP.

Using my hosting package I can go and install WordPress (or other CMS packages Joomla, Drupal, etc...) and the hosting company actually give me a one click button to do all the install for me (useful if you've never done it before).

The CMS (content management system) you install is up to you. Take a look at something like this... http://www.techi.com/2011/07/open-sourc ... vs-joomla/

Wordpress is an easy to use system primarily set up for blogging but it can do a lot more.
Drupal and Joomla are alternatives. There is always a balance with these between what you can do and the compleixty of doing it.

Any of the above will allow you to download (possibly for free) a theme and apply it to your site and then provide an easy way to add content like pages, blog posts, image galleries, etc, etc...

HTH

Um, I think you'll find you will need to pay that every couple of years or so. You only ever rent your domain name.

Ah, didn't know that. Thanks

Personal choice, but I guess you need to figure out a list of exactly what you want on the site and how you want the bits to relate to each other[/quote]

That depends. Most companies who provide hosting also provide an email server (or access to Google Mail) where you provide your own domain name (so you have a snowy@snowysdomain.com address)

Domain is the address (eg. snowsydomain.com). You can have, and may want, multiple domains for a site (eg. snowysdomain.com, snowysdomain.co.uk, snowysdomain.net, snowy.com) to A) make it easier for n00bs to get right and B) stop people getting confused if someone else later rents a very similar domain

That varies. Storage tends not to be the issue (at the end of the day html is just plain text, and you want stuff reasonably compressed from a performance point of view anyhow); it's bandwidth that's the bugger. Again this depends on how popular your site ends up being, but generally if you start small you can move things from one hosting package or host to another relatively seamlessly as you outgrow things[/quote]

No, sorry. Letters, digits and hyphens only, with hyphens banned from being the first or last character.

If you host the site with the same company you bought the name from, then the ~£3 annual renewal is often included in the cost of the package so it might not be listed as a separate payment. It's usually simplest to do this, since you don't have to mess with name servers or DNS just to get your email and website up. I'm not saying it's complicated, but a lot of people prefer to keep it simple and since pretty much everyone charges the same price for a domain there's usually not much reason to deal with 2 different companies off the bat.


I would separate business and pleasure, or different types of business.

For example, you might not want your "I love Strictly" blog on the same domain you use for your consultancy project. You might have another for more professional personal blogs, portfolios and suchlike to act as an example you can give to prospective employers.

Personally, I have one domain which is purely for a small business and one domain for personal stuff. There is no connection between the two. However, the personal one has sub-domains and various pages dedicated to different topics (most of which have been "under construction" for the last decade but never mind). If I started an unrelated business, I would use a different domain.

Choosing your domain name(s) is the first step. Consider what you want to use it for, and what it should mean to other people.
Choosing which company to secure them with is the next step. This does not have to be a UK based company, but you may prefer that for legal reasons.

Setting up email for most SOHO / individuals is simply a matter of pointing *@mydomain to your existing gmail account. You can then set up gmail to send using that email address. Email forwarding like this is usually included in the £3 per year.

Setting up the website(s) could mean anything, depending on what you want to achieve. I really can't think of an off-the-shelf solution that has the simple elegance of your existing site combined with greater flexibility, but things like Wordpress and Drupal have zillions of plugins and themes so I'm sure there's a relatively easy way. Paying someone the going rate to do it for you will cost quite a lot, so that really depends on how much time and money you have.