How to get a web site

Every now and then someone asks me some variation of the question: “How do I get a web site?” It’s a question I enjoy answering, because the web is always changing, and as time goes on you can do more and more with less and less money and expertise.

My friend Sumitra today told me her 12-year-old cousin was building a site for her a capella group, Red No. 5, and asked what it would take to host it. I thought I would post my response here for everyone:

Hi Sumitra!

Well there are generally three ways to do it:

1) If you want to have a lot of control, fancy stuff… get a web hosting account. I really like BlueHost. Downside: it’s $7/month and requires some expertise. Upside: you can do whatever you want with it.

2) You can use a site that provides a web app that helps you build the site. The basic versions of these sites are free, but it can be another $5-10 if you want to have your own domain name or custom appearance. These sites are much easier, and in some cases cheaper than BlueHost, but you have less flexibility. These are some of my favorites:

http://www.weebly.com/
http://www.yikesite.com/
http://www.yola.com/

Another benefit of these sites is that anyone can sign in and edit the text and stuff.

3) Get a blog. You can get a wordpress.com blog with your own domain and totally customized appearance for about $25/year. This is probably a little less flexible even than the sites in option #2, but you can honestly do a lot with a blog. Plus it’s really easy for anyone to update it.

http://wordpress.com/
http://www.typepad.com/

I suppose the other option, which is totally free and completely customizable is for your little hacker cousin to build the site in Ruby on Rails and deploy it to http://heroku.com. It’d be a good learning experience for her. But it’s a rather advanced approach.

Anyway, that’s off the top of my head what I’d say. If you poke around at those options, and you want more details about what you can do with the different ones, let me know.

As for me, I’m doing pretty good. I’m sure I’ll be heading east some time soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Love,
Erik