Track this topic | Email this topic | Print this topic

I just found out about Angelfire. So should I make my own site and what should it be about?

--------------------

I treasure those who I love that love me in return. <3

If you don't know what it should be about, the chances are you aren't going to be interested enough to maintain it for very long. If you cannot maintain interest in your site, you might end up like of the many dozens of sites littering the web that've been just simply abandoned by neglectful creators.Like this one for example or perhaps this one! Cough, cough, hack, wheeze.

As for how you should start it, there are pretty much two ways to go about it: You can learn a combination of HTML and CSS to write the pages from scratch or if you're feeling lazy you can get a WYSIWYG editor such as NVU to create the webpages for you. Of the two, if you're going to start a webpage, I would highly recommend at least learning the syntax of the code yourself. It's very surpisingly simple and will allow you to troubleshoot broken pages yourself. If you need a resource to help you learning, w3schools is a very good place to start.

Forums like CoN's may not be directly possible on a free webhost but if you feel your site needs one, there are sites like invisionfree webhosting. If you feel you're a little more tech handy, have the server access and your host's ToS will allow it, you can try your hand at installing the forum software yourself: phpBB is a very popular and once again free option for this.

Some people also mentioned Word Press as being useful to me once a long time ago, on these very forums, although I forgot why exactly. It's supposed to be very easy to use though.

So essentially you have two ways to go about it, the astute techie nerd path or the technologically impaired easy path. What's right for you really depends upon just how dedicated or important

Or as a third option, if you've got money to burn you could possibly hire somebody like R51 to design it for you. I'm not quite sure what services he offers but as you can clearly see all around you, he does great work. Not all alone mind you but I sure as heck don't see Tiddles selling his services anywhere, even if that would be an awesome as heck name for a manservant.

For your purposes, that third option is probably rather too costly though. I'd only really recommend this if the focus of your site was professional, as to allow you to focus on other aspects of the business and eventually make a return investment on the money spent. If you are indeed thinking about a commercially oriented site though, a free webhost like Angelfire just simply won't do. I say this because the resources of such providers is rather far too limited and you'd probably have to cope with rather unprofessional looking subdomains. Just incase you're wondering, a subdomain is when a site goes something like www.yoursite.hostname.com instead of simply simply www.yoursite.com. Free webhosts usually offer these so you don't have to go to a registry site like Go Daddy and pay to buy or pay to keep a normal website address for yourself.

As a final word of advice, do check out your Webhost's services and ToS to find out exactly what you can and cannot do. Many of the free ones don't allow you all the freedoms that a normal webhost would let you have because they're strapped on resources and will eventually shut you down if your website doesn't meet a certain quota for activity. Even if you do pay, you have to pay mind to certain specs like disk space and bandwidth usage, simply because no server has truly unlimited resource. For a small personal website, just about anything should do fine but if you're looking to do something professional or quite popular, you're most likely going to have to fork over some cash to get something more suitable. Here's a rather extensively detailed, if not ugly looking, list of free/trial services a person like yourself could use if AngelFire ends up not quite sitting right with you.

P.S. Yeah, I'm quite sorry if that was all so long winded as to go right over your head. It's just that I've just been contemplating the matter for quite a long time myself but never really could quite motivate myself to do so. Several people have wanted me to go in it on with them but I never really was too terribly excited about those projects and the people I worked with weren't quite so dedicated themselves either. Any which way you do it, it seems like a lot of work to me...

This post has been edited by Tonepoet on 5th February 2010 09:43

--------------------

Role reversal at its finest.

Yeah, Angelfire is so pro compared to Hostgator or Ripway. Sure is has shitty sitebuilders and a bandwidth limit the size of Obama's ego, but it's free, isn't it?