Website Creation

There are lots of "freebie" places on the web where you can create your website, such as weebly.com, homestead.com, viviti.com or bluevoda.com... not to mention all the blogging websites like Wordpress, MySpace, LiveJournal, TypePad, MyBlogSite, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter on the Internet ...but these places:
1) create "cookie-cutter" sites that have a strangely similar look and feel - deja-vu all over again;
2) place your website name as a sub-domain under theirs, such as "fred-smith.weebly.com" - not very professional-looking; and
3) lock you into their hosting service and/or their proprietary website software - they "own you," so it's very difficult to pick up your website and move to another hosting service. And if that free service goes belly-up, your website goes "poof" - it vanishes.

So if you'd like to have your own custom website and unique email addresses that you control, you can either contact us (see below) to help you design it and bring it online, or you can click on FastDomain.com to set it up yourself. This is the hosting service we use. Another one I've used for clients is the top-rated JustHost service - both offer lots of free extras like autoresponders, MySQL, WordPress (with your own domain name), LiveSite, Joomla, Drupal, Moodle and more. We can also teach you how to attract visitors to your new website: what good is a store front if nobody comes through the front doors? And we pledge to use standard, off-the-shelf or open source software so that you're not "locked in" to us.

The first type of custom website creation is what you see here at CompuNerds.Net - a header of your choice (it can be a photo of you or your business, etc.), a navigation menu and a footer that appear on every page are included in our "template.html" template (model) file. The size and style of your menu, body text and links are defined using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). To add a new page, all you do is make a copy of this template.html file giving it the new name you choose. Then add your title and text - for this part you can use the "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) open-source website editor and FTP uploader "KompoZer" from PortableApps.com.

The header, menu and footer automatically appear on every page. JavaScripts control the contact info, menu and footer, so you only need to modify those items in one place and the changes automatically show up on each page. Last, add the new file name to the menu on each page and upload the new and changed pages to your website. When you want to make some changes to the text in any existing pages, just use the WYSIWYG "KompoZer" program and upload the changes to your website. Because you create and maintain your website on your computer, you always retain control of your website.

The second method of creating and maintaining a custom website is to use a CMS (Content Management System) such as LiveSite, Joomla or Drupal - three very popular open-source CMSs. Everything is automated in LiveSite, Joomla and Drupal so you don't have to think about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. - the entire user interface is WYSIWYG. LiveSite is a fairly simple CMS that ncludes blogs, forums, calendars, photo galleries, web forms, shopping carts, content management, e-commerce, SEO, ads, membership management, donations, login access, staff portals, project portals, mailing lists, e-mail campaigns, and more.

Joomla or Drupal are even more powerful CMSs. The flip side of using them is that they are quite large software packages, and they require a fairly steep learning curve (especially Drupal). One thing to keep in mind with CMSs is they run on your website server - you add or modify pages by working directly on your website server. So you should make frequent backups and download them to your computer in case you might some day decide to move your website to another hosting service.