I know it's been quite a while since my last post, but I have a good reason. I've spent the last few weeks working on launching my first website. You can check it out at www.learnfreeclassroom.com. This is a directory site listing free college courses, training materials, and learning resources available online. I created this site on Weebly. Weebly is a free web host with a great site builder interface. To get started, go to Weebly.com and sign up for a free account. Once you've signed up, creating your site is extremely easy. Select a template for your site from the ones available. If you don't see something you like, and you know html and css, just pick something close to what you want, and you can go in later and modify the template by clicking the Edit HTML/CSS tab in the upper right corner while you're in the Design tab. Once you have your template selected and modified, the rest is just drag and drop. On the Elements tab, you can pick whatever elements you want on your page and drag them into place. Once you have the elements in place, start adding your content. It's really that easy. You don't need to know anything about html or css, it's a very user friendly system. To add additional pages, go to the Pages tab and select Add Page. Then just repeat the process of dragging in elements and adding content. You can also add a blog to your site in the same way you added a page. At times the site builder feels a little glitchy. I don't know if this is because of the interface in general, or if it just works better with certain configurations. I switched back and forth between two different computers and different browsers. I had the most trouble using Chrome on my Windows XP computer, I switched to Firefox, and that eliminated most of the problems. I also had some issues using Firefox on my Ubuntu system, but it was not as bad as with Chrome. Overall, the interface issues were just minor frustrations and I still think the site builder is an excellent tool that makes building a website super easy. Also, one of the elements available in Weebly's site builder is a Google AdSense element. To use this, you have to split the revenue with Weebly, but if your site is drawing enough traffic this setup will do until you can afford to pay for hosting. When you create your site in Weebly, you can use a subdomain for free. I went ahead and purchased my own domain name from GoDaddy and directed it to my Weebly site. Weebly gives you the option to purchase your domain name through their site, which would be the easy way to go, but I've heard a lot of people say that you should not register your domain with the same company that is providing the hosting. I don't know that this is really necessary, but I don't want to risk it. So, if you have an idea for your first website, then head over to Weebly and get started. The set-up only takes a few minutes, then it's just a matter of adding your content. Thanks for reading and check back soon for more updates.
Resources from this Post:
Weebly
GoDaddy
