Beginners Website on the Cheap

You have all the skills I had before I authored my first web page. All I knew was how to send email. Once I got a place to put my website (host) and a domain name and paid something like five dollars a month for the service, that was the end of my expense. You might be able to find cheaper hosts.

I taught myself everything from online resources for free. I searched for "HTML tutorial" and the links that came up have more information than a person needs to learn to make a web page. I think someone who already knows how to send an email can probably learn how to make a basic, useful web page in an hour to four hours with the help from these tutorials. A class in the subject is not really necessary and I never had one. I also never used the help that the service providers offer with there free software. The first hour or steps are the most confusing and after that, things go very fast.

Here is the freeware I use now in 2008 for my Windows computer. Macs have similar programs. Be aware that over time, freeware either goes out of business or begins charging and it becomes necessary to look for new titles. Currently I use FTP Commander Lite and PageBreeze. In the past I have used other freeware, but it is no longer free so I searched and found these programs. There are a lot of places to get freeware safely and I no longer worry much about catching viruses, etc.. One trusted name is Tucows.com. If PageBreeze and FTP Commander are no longer available for free when you read this, then just go to Tucows or another freeware site and search for an "HTML editor" and an "FTP" program. I have another article online about the details of an HTML editor which I think are important. If you want a good way to edit photos to decrease their file size or make buttons out of them, then get PhotoFiltre for free or another "graphics editor" freeware program.

Make sure that you are getting freeware. Shareware usually expires after some period like 30 days and you have to pay for it or has some functional limit or is nagware and pop-ups appear to remind you of where to pay, etc.. Often the freeware will eventually improve enough that the author has a payware version and I will pay for it at that time if I have been happy with it. Freeware is my favorite way to try a product without any commitments. When I switched to PageBreeze, I must have tried about 20 other freeware programs which were unsatisfactory for one reason or other. I put that story online with Associated Content if you are interested.

After you have learned HTML, there are other free tutorials online for other languages used in web page building and you can still go a long ways for free. Java, Perl, PHP and other languages you have heard of can do a lot of incredible things, but you probably will never need that additional functionality. PageBreeze (or any HTML editor) and HTML can make web pages that show videos, photos, play music, automatically provide email forms and have buttons sending folks to other web pages, either yours or any others on the web.

The freeware I have mentioned here is all you'll ever need if you want to build web pages that have the capabilities of 80 percent of the web pages you now find on the Internet.