Well I wrote this paper today going over almost everything you have to do to start a website. I go over brainstorming, to purchasing hosting, to setting up the site, than skinning the site. I highly recommend reading this if you wish to start a website like Myspace.com or Youtube or Photobucket. The paper can also bring you into web design, which has money in it.

Websites 101
By GrahamPhisher
July 16, 2008

Preface

Hey everyone its my birthday I got nothing better to do, and i’m now 17 nothing changed. So I decided to write a tutorial on starting your own website. After this you will be able to make a blog, forum, or social networking community like Myspace. The great thing about this tutorial, you will need no experience with computers, just a idea of what you want your website to be like. Also if your wondering whose writing this, just know someone whose been managing websites for 3 years now.

Brainstorming

Alright first off you need to have a reason to start a site, not just because you think its cool, if you do it like that your just gonna be waisting your own time. Do you want to start a site because you need a portfolio to show off your freelance job? Do you need a forum to put advertisements in to start making money? Do you need your own place to chill? Do you think you got a idea for the next big site like youtube or myspace? Also don’t think about just putting up some random piece of crap, plan, and ask people if they would come a site like the one you have in your mind? Move onto the next step when u think you got your idea.

Choosing A Host & Domain

Alright now we will need a host to put our site online, I would teach you how to set up your own home server to host your website, but that would cost more than paying for a host. Yes i know, I said the word you all probably hate, “pay”, Everyone pays in some way to keep their website up. A preferred trusted recommended web host of mine is bluehost dot com (http://www.bluehost.com/), they offer content hosting (your website), and domain hosting (your dot com or dot net).

To Purchase a Domain and Content Hosting Got To The Following Link.
http://www.bluehost.com/sign_up_now.html

If you do not want to use blue host, please check out the following sites.

http://www.hostmonster.com/
http://www.ixwebhosting.com
http://www.hostgator.com/
http://www.inmotionhosting.com/

Please note after purchasing your hosting and domain it might take a while for your domain to set to your web host, please give your domain 1 hour to 5 hours to set to your hosting, in the mean time we can set up the site.

The Systems

Alright now we are going to choose our content management system to use on our host. If your reading this your probably not a high level server side scripter or in that case even know what that is, so were going to use a pre-built content management system. Anyways a content management system is a web application that allows you to easily manage your website with no programming skill at all, unless you want to make your own skin, which you will probably have to know the low level browser scripting language CSS aka cascading style sheets. So here are your options.

Portfolio Blog CMS
If you want to make a simple blog, or portfolio, I highly recommend the WordPress CMS, as used on my site GrahamPhisher.com, but mine is pretty modified.

You can download WordPress for free at the following site.
http://wordpress.org/

Social Networking CMS

To start your own website like myspace it will probably cost money to buy the CMS, but who knows you might end up getting a million dollars out of it. Theres a free CMS called Dolphin that you dont have to pay for that is similar to Myspace, and one you have to pay for one called OurSpace which is a Youtube and Myspace clone.

You can download Dolphin for free at the following site.
http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/

You can purchase Our Space for $150 at the following site.
http://www.2coolcode.com/ourspace/index.shtml

Bulliten Board System

Alright to start your own forum like officialpsds.com/forums or security-forums.com your going to want good secure bulliten board system. The reason I say secure is because BBS aka bulliten board systems are usually the target of skids aka wannabe hackers. So I recommend the Simple Machine Forums bulliten board system.

You Can download SMFBBS for free at the following site.
http://www.simplemachines.org/

News Portal + Forum

Some people want a homepage to the board instead of just a forum. I recommend the following CMS + Forum software, Joomla With Fireboard.

You can download Joomla for free at the following site.
http://www.joomla.org/

You can download FireBoard for free at the following site.
http://www.bestofjoomla.com/content/blogsection/3/9/

Other Systems

Here are some clone scripts of other popular sites.

Rapidshare
http://www.webdevlabs.com/php-scripts/rapidshare-clone/

Ebay
http://www.ajsquare.com/products/auction/index.php

Digg
http://www.kubelabs.com/phpdug/

Youtube
http://www.greatclone.com/product_in…products_id=86

Coppermine
http://coppermine-gallery.net/

Wikipedia
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf…group_id=34373

Gmail
http://i-netsolution.com/product_new.html#emailportal

Setting The CMS/BBS Up

Alright if you followed my instructions and selected one of the hosts above your host should of sent you your account information, a control panel login, and FTP login details, a address to connect to, a username, and password. Your probably wondering what FTP is, to make it short it stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is a easy and fast way to transfer the CMS/BBS files onto the host. First off you will need a FTP Client to connect to your host. (Note if your feeling confused, just keep following along, I understand that this can sound sorta funky). Anyways I recommend that you use FlashFXP a great FTP client that is easy to use to connect to your host to upload your CMS/BBS files.

You can download a free 30 day trial of FlashFXP at the following website.
http://www.flashfxp.com/

Alright now install FlashFXP like you would with any software, and launch it. When FlashFXP is open and selected hit key “F8″ on your computer, and enter the info your web host gave you, where it asks for server url, enter the FTP address your host gave you, where it says user name enter your user name, and where it asks for password, of course enter the password they gave you or the one you set. If you enter your login information wrong in the status window it will say “[R] Connection failed”, if you enter everything correctly you will see folders in the right navigation box above the status window.

After you connected properly you should be in your sites root folder, and you should see the folder “public_html” or “www”, enter either one, if you dont see a folder labled one of those names, you are probably already in it. Now open the CMS/BBS you downloaded, and extract the files to your desktop, now in FlashFXP in your left navigation box, navigate to your desktop, which should be at,

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Desktop

Than find the CMS/BBS files you extracted to your desktop and Click and Drag your mouse over all the files to select them, than hit “CTRL + T” and let the files upload. Note this may take a while since a CMS ussually consists of 100+ files and will probably take up most of your internet usage while its uploading, so watch TV, Photoshop, Get Drunk, to wait while it uploads.

After your sites CMS/BBS files are all uploaded go to your website and you should be prompted with a Installation Screen asking for a Database Name, Database Username, and Database Password, for this you are going to create a Mysql Database in your Control Panel, so go to the control panel your host gives you, they should of sent you a link to it in your email when you registered with them.

When inside your Cpanel scroll down to a section called Databases or something similar. Under it there should be a button called MYSQL Databases, click it to enter it. In the Mysql Databases Panel there should be a section on top called “Create New Database” enter any random name for your database, something someone else wouldn’t guess, than click “Create Database”. Now scroll down to “MySQL Users”, and under it there should be something called “Add New User”, type in a Username and Password into the boxes under, and press create. Next we need to add the user to the database, to do this scroll down to “Add User To Database”, and there should be a drop down box selection, User and Database, select the user you just created, and the database you just created, and you should be brought to a new screen asking for the privleges for the account you just created, click “ALL PRIVILEGES” to make sure all boxes are checked, than click make changes, and you should be brought to a new screen telling you the user has been successfully added to the database.

Now go back to your site and enter the following database name, username, and password you just made into the boxes, you will also be asked be ask for database host, I assume your not linking to a offsite d/b, so just type in “local_host”, you might also be asked for a database pretag, just enter the pretag you see in your mysql database panel. They might also ask you other questions like, website name, username, email, and more, make sure you enter all your proper info. Than Click next screen and if you did everything right, you will get no errors. Congrats your website is up. If you happen to have problems, you can contact your host over the phone to ask you to guide you through it.

Skinning The CMS/BBS

Now that you have your website up you probably want to skin your site to add some style to it, Most content management systems have third party websites that have free skins for download, just google “system name themes”. If you want to create your own custom skin for the theme, your going to have to learn two low level programming languages, CSS and HTML, you can learn the following two levels with no past programming expearince at the following site, www.w3schools.com . While skinning your CMS/BBS you might encounter a language called PHP, w3schools also teaches it, but PHP is a mid level programming language which you will a pretty web savy mind to learn, but anyways you can probably edit and tinker with the PHP when creating a theme, you don’t need any experience to do that.

Last Notes

Well now you should be a well informed web site manager, and a great web developer if you learned CSS and HTML, and a sav if you learned PHP. Anyways if you did not know, people are willing to pay people to create websites for them, my job is web design, and it beats working a 9 to 5.

Anyways Hope You Enjoied The Tutorial.