Quick Tip Series: Basic Website Setup - Tools

Jul.25, 2008 in Internet, Quick Tips

Part three in our Basic Website Setup Series! So far we have looked at

This week we are looking at Site Building Tools. Now professionals tend to use a program called Dreamweaver by Adobe, or something similar. However for beginners this is a steep learning curve and one that can often be avoided.

We recommend that you use a pre-written tool to create your site and manage it as well. For most people a simple blogging tool will be more than enough, however for those that want something more they will need a Content Management System (or CMS for short!).

The tool you use will need to work with your hosting provider, for this tip we are going to work with tools that come with Fantastico as that is often installed on the control panel of a Linux hosting package.

For full details on how to install these tools you will need to see your hosting providers support pages, but just to give you an idea. You can log into your control panel (cPanel) and select fantastico and without any programming or web building knowledge install tools such as:

The first two are Blogging tools and the last 3 are CMS tools. Our favourite is Wordpress, it is easy to use, easy to install, there are many themes and plugins available to make a site that does just what you need it to. Check out our User’s Review of Wordpress here.

With a tool like this you just have to learn to use their Admin area, which in my opinion is much easier than learning Dreamweaver and getting messy with an FTP application. It often involves just filling in form types pages to get your content online!

Once your domain and hosting is setup (see your hosting provider on how to do this, you will need to point the nameserves of your domain to your hosting space) you can literally have a site up and running in minutes with a tool like the ones we have listed, all that takes the time is you coming up with valuable content to put on it!

I hope this helped, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments or if you get a site up and running like this link us to it!