Site Building

As an affiliate, chances are you'll end up building a website or two. This section covers aspects of site building from purchasing your first domain and uploading your website, all the way through to creating 301 redirects in your htaccess.

Step-by-step: Building a basic web page

In this lesson I'm going to show you how to create a very basic webpage with a title, a header, a link and an image. But that's not all... we're going to create the same page three times using three different web authoring softwares! The aim of this lesson is to show you, firstly, how easy it actually is to create basic webpages. Secondly it's to give you a peek inside three different authoring environments, so you can decide which one is best for you. Here's the page we're going to create: (IMAGE) Dreamweaver (note: This lesson was created using Dreamweaver MX (2004)) Once you've fired up Dreamweaver, we need to create a new document. File > New > Select "basic page" and "HTML" > Click "Create " The first thing to notice with Dreamweaver is the three buttons in the top-left of the page, called "Code", "Split", ... read more »

Uploading your website with Filezilla

In this lesson I’m going to show you how to: Set up your FTP program so it can connect to your website Upload files from your computer to your website Make changes to content on your site Acronym alert: FTP = File Transfer Protocol. It's a system that allows you to log in to a server (your web hosting) and upload, download or modify content. For this lesson we’re going to use Filezilla, which is a free open source FTP program for both PC and Mac. Filezilla is a reasonably standard FTP program, and you’ll find that most programs operate in a similar way. If you’ve got Dreamweaver or some other HTML editing program which has the ability to upload your website, you might get a little bit lost in this lesson since the process can be a little different. But even if you are creating your website in one of these programs, you can still use a separa... read more »

Linking your domain with hosting

If you've purchased your domain name and your hosting from different companies, you need to perform a simple operation to essentially link the two together. 1) Make sure that your hosting account knows that it will be using your particular domain name Depending on who you're using for your hosting, you might be prompted to enter your domain name when you first sign up for hosting (HostGator) or you might be allowed to purchase hosting without having a domain name first (GoDaddy). If you didn't tell your hosting provider your domain name when you signed up, you will need to log in to your hosting control panel (or similar) and "add" that domain. If your hosting is already aware of your domain name, this will usually appear in the welcome email they send you, and you can skip this step. Update your name servers (DNS) The next thing you need to do (and often t... read more »

What to look for in a hosting provider

After you've found yourself a domain name, the second important necessity for your website is web hosting. Essentially, the place where you store all your website's files so that they can be accessed any time of the day or night. Setting up your web hosting isn't as complicated or traumatic as it might sound, and these days you don't even need to be particularly technically-minded to have everything up and running in a short time. QUESTION: WHAT IS HOSTING? ANSWER: A web hosting provider is basically a company that stores all your website files on a server so that they can be accessed from the internet. Your web host is different from your domain name: Your hosting is your storage, whereas your domain name is like a big neon sign pointing to where your site is hosted. The real purpose of the domain name is that it's much easier to remember than the glorious string of... read more »

Which website building software to use

Dreamweaver (Adobe) Dreamweaver is the most comprehensive and powerful web authoring software on the market, and it has been for some time now. It's a WYSIWYG editor (“what you see is what you get”) with the capacity for hand-tooling your HTML in a separate editor window. Learning Dreamweaver can take some time, as it is a very complex piece of software. It's well worth taking the time to go through the tutorials in the 'help' section, or finding some tutorials online. Dreamweaver can also be very pricey, depending on where you're purchasing from. Be aware that you can frequently purchase older versions of Dreamweaver for drastically reduced prices from places like eBay. An older version will work just fine. You can also download a free 30-day trial from Adobe.com, and this should be enough to give you a taste for the software. Nvu (Linspire) If you're very new t... read more »

More video lessons in Site Building »

Registering a domain name

Anatomy of a web page 1

Good housekeeping

Web design troubleshooting

How to get your website indexed

Anatomy of a web page 2

How to hide your affiliate link with redirects

How to make a round cornered box

Simplifying navigation with PHP includes

Date scripts

Sitemaps

How to move your pages with 301 redirects

URL Canonicalization – To www or not to www?

Robots.txt - Telling the search engines what they can and cannot index

How to create a rollover button

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