Build Your Own Website - 2

Using a template is a pretty good way to get your feet wet as far as building a website. But they're pretty arbitrary and may not let you put stuff exactly where you want to put it on the page. If you use the templates provided by your ISP (internet service provider) and store your site on their server, your site name is also provided by the ISP. You may be able to have your name as part of it, or maybe not. But it certainly will not be a top level domain name, mywebhome@myname.com.

Top level domain names (TLD) must be purchased/registered as part of the domain name service (DNS) through a Registrar. Registrars are companies accredited by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers Authority) to register your domain name. ICANN is the global, non-profit, private-sector coordinating body acting in the public interest. Among its other responsibilities, ICANN oversees the processes and systems that ensure that each domain name maps to the correct numeric IP address. For non-technical as well as technical explanations of the role of ICANN, go to - http://www.internic.net/faqs/authoritative-dns.html

That page and many others are provided by ICANN on the InterNIC website to provide probably more information than most want to know regarding Internet domain registration services!

The following link will take you to a long list of ICANN accredited registrars, worldwide. You may click on any of the names to go to more lists, since most Registrars have many companies licensed under them who can resell DNS services. However, the names are actually registered with ICANN under the top Registrar.

No two domain names may be the same and as long as I pay the annual or longer term registration fee for my domain, sylvianickels.com, (I also own sylvianickels.net) no one else may use it. Other domains are available, though some such as .biz are reserved for businesses, .aero reserved for the global aviation community, .travel for the travel industry, etc. Registrars for country domains, .uk, .de, and such, called ccTLD's, are not accredited by ICANN, but by a designated country code manager, presumably in that country.

Most free hosting services will take care of this for you, but that part will cost you. The price varies from an average $25 up and down, depending on what other services you buy. I use namecheap.com because it is, as the name says, cheap, $8.88 per year per domain name. I have registered and am technical contact for a couple of other domains, for a writing group and an ezine.

If you just want a simple personal website to share some of your interests and/or pictures, the one provided by your ISP is a good place to start. Use it for a while, experiment with web design, read and learn. When you learn enough to want to stretch your wings a little and escape the confines of templates, you can do one of two things. If you want to learn a little bit about HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) the coding underlying any webpage, buy a simple book. I bought a very elementary book and one that was, to put it mildly, a little more complicated, at a used bookstore.

The simpler book, Creating Web Pages with HTML Simplified, 2nd edition, IDG Book's Bestselling 3-D Visual Series, has very clear pictures, text, and illustrations as to what the code looks like and the page it produces. It walks you through coding to build simple, colorful webpages in which the HTML coding is part of the page itself. This is how I first built a 5-10 page website. The coding was not pretty, by any means. But it worked.

Another way to incorporate HTML coding into your website is with Cascading Style Sheets, CSS. The second book I bought, HTML for the World Wide Web, by Elizabeth Castro, taught me this. When I had almost worn the pages out of the book, had it bristling with notes, and managed to re-create some of my pages by the basic principles of CSS, I was converted. It's the way I build all my pages now.

Article 3 will have more on basic HTML coding and how to create simple pages with it. In Article 4 I'll give some basic pointers for creating webpages with Cascading Style Sheets.