In the digital age, setting up your personal website can be accomplished in a matter of minutes and without any financial investment. This allows you to experiment and develop your content before committing to a domain name and web hosting service. You can easily create a website with 20-50 pages, ranging from 5-50 MB, completely free of charge.
There are numerous services that offer free websites. These include online service providers like AOL, as well as a variety of web-based servers. In exchange for the free service, you may need to allow some ad banners or links on your site. Some servers, such as Geocities and Xoom, even provide their own web building software to assist you. A comprehensive list of over 200 free website hosts can be found at Freewebspace.
When using these free services, you can choose a name for your site, if it's available. This name will follow the address of the site, for example, www.geocities.com/yourchosenname. If you wish to create another site, simply choose another name and sign up again.
Creating your first web pages can be as simple as using a word processing program like Word 2000, which has built-in coding to convert a document into a web page. This coding is known as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). To start, save your document as an HTML file.
If you're only planning to create a few pages, a word processing program will suffice. Your first page should be named index.html or index.htm, which is recognized as the first web page on most servers. As you create additional documents, add hyperlinks to these pages for easy navigation. Include a hyperlink on each page that leads back to your index page, labeled as "home".
When designing your pages, you can add text and graphics as you would in any word processing program. For more control over the layout, use tables. A common approach is to create a table for the entire page and divide it into three columns. The first column can be used for navigation, the second as a separator, and the third for the main content.
If your website consists of more than a few pages, consider using a web creation program like Front Page. This software can help you establish a system of hyperlinks and a navigation system, making it easier to manage your website's structure.
Once your pages are ready to be uploaded, the most straightforward method is to use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program, also known as an FTP client. Popular free options include WS-FTP and Cute FTP, which can be downloaded from software download sites like CNET.
After installing your FTP client, open it and locate your website files. On the other side of the client, enter the location of the FTP site where you're hosting your website (this information will be provided by your server). Enter your ID name and password, select the files you wish to transfer, and click the indicator to upload them. Your web pages will then be live and viewable in your browser.
You can continue to add new files or update existing ones as needed. When you're ready to upgrade, you can transfer your website files to a new location, whether it's another free site or your own domain.
