Web Design ABC - How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat.

How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat.

Once you've chosen your web hosting, you'll often find that you're given a set of passwords and technical details, before being left to more-or-less figure it out on your own. If you haven't started a website before, that can be a daunting experience.

Point Your Domain at Your Host.

The email you received should have contained the addresses of some nameservers. Nameservers look like this: ns1.yourhost.com. If you can't find it, take a look at the help section of your host's website.

Once you know your host's nameserver, go and log in at your domain name registrar's website. They all work differently, but somewhere you should see options to configure your domain. Replace the registrar's default nameservers with your host's nameservers.

Try going to your domain by typing

www.yourdomain.com into your web browser. If it's working, you should see a page telling you that your configuration was successful. If it doesn't, then you should take a break for a day or two - nameserver changes can still take a while to spread across the whole Internet.

Test Your FTP Account.

The next step is to try uploading a page to your website by FTP. Before you can do that, though, you need an FTP program and a test page.

The easiest way to make a test page is to open Notepad and write "this is a test". Save it as index.html. When it comes to the FTP program, you have a lot of choice. There's something for everyone: some good free ones to consider are Cute FTP (cuteftp.com), Smart FTP (smartftp.com) and Bulletproof FTP (bpftp.com).

Once you've done that, open the FTP program and ask it to connect to your host's FTP server. This is usually ftp.yourhost.com, although you might also now be able to access it through your own website by using ftp.yourdomain.com. Once you're connected, you should browse through the folders looking for any existing index.html file - it'll usually be in a folder called something like 'public' or 'public_html'. Upload your own index.html over this one, and say 'yes' when you're asked if you want to overwrite it.

Now, go to your website in a web browser. If everything's worked the way it should, then you'll see what you wrote in that file right there on your website! You can get started straightaway writing real content to replace that little bit of text - it's always exciting when you realise that your site is out there and ready on the web right now. If you don't see the text, on the other hand, then you might want to refer to your host's support pages.

Set Up an Email Address.

Almost all web hosts allow you to configure your account using a program called cPanel. The host your email sent you should tell you how to access it: it'll usually be something like http://www.yourdomain.com:2082/cpanel. If you know the address but you can't get to the page, you might need to disable any firewall software you have running on your computer.

If you've got the cPanel address right, you'll be asked for your username and password, and then you'll be presented with a screen full of icons. Which icons you have will depend on which features you got with your web hosting. Look for the icon called 'email', and then create any accounts you want there.

To check your email, you need to add an account in your email program. This shouldn't be too much trouble: look for an option called 'Accounts' in your email program's 'Tools' menu, and then tell it you want to add an email account. You'll be asked for POP3 and SMTP servers (your host can provide these), as well as the email address and password you just configured in cPanel. Try sending an email to your new address from one of your other accounts, to see if it works.

Other Things to Do with cPanel.

It varies from website to website exactly what you might need to do with cPanel. It makes it easy, though, to do whatever you might need to do, whether it's adding new FTP accounts or creating databases. Don't worry: cPanel is designed to stop you from messing anything up, so it's fine to experiment with it a little.

ColdFusion Quicker Scripting at a Price

How Databases Work

Building a Budget Website

Clean Page Structure Headings and Lists

LAMP The Most Popular Server System Ever

Web Design
◦ 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments.
◦ 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look.
◦ 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website.
◦ 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better.
◦ A Question of Scroll Bars.
◦ Ads Under the Radar: Linking to Affiliates.
◦ AJAX: Should You Believe the Hype?
◦ All About Design: Principles and Elements.
◦ An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro.
◦ An Issue of Width: the Resolution Problem.
◦ Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts: Content Management Software.
◦ Beware the Stock Photographer: Picking Your Pictures.
◦ Building a Budget Website.
◦ Building Online Communities.
◦ Clean Page Structure: Headings and Lists.
◦ ColdFusion: Quicker Scripting, at a Price.
◦ Column Designs with CSS.
◦ Content is King.
◦ CSS and the End of Tables.
◦ Cut to the Chase: How to Make Your Website Load Faster.
◦ Designing for Sales.
◦ Designing for Search Engines.
◦ Dreamweaver: The Professional Touch.
◦ Encryption and Security with SSL.
◦ Finding a Good HTML Editor.
◦ Focus on the User: Task-Oriented Websites.
◦ Fonts are More Important Than You Think.
◦ Free Graphics Alternatives.
◦ FrontPage: Easy Pages.
◦ Hints All the Way.
◦ Hiring Professionals: 5 Things to Look For.
◦ How Databases Work.
◦ How the Web Works.
◦ How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs.
◦ How to Install and Configure a Forum.
◦ How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites.
◦ How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy.
◦ How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat.
◦ IIS and ASP: Microsoft's Server.
◦ Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More.
◦ It's a World Wide Web: Going International.
◦ JSP: Java on Your Server.
◦ LAMP: The Most Popular Server System Ever.
◦ Making Friends and Influencing People: the Importance of Links.
◦ Making Searches Simple.
◦ Offering Free Downloads on Your Website.
◦ Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software.
◦ tag - they have one extra tag before it. This is the doctype, and it must be present right at the top of your document for it to be valid HTML. There are only really
◦ Perl: Cryptic Power.
◦ Photoshop: a Graphic Designer's Dream.
◦ Picking a Colour Scheme.
◦ Printing and Sending: the Two Things Users Want to Do.
◦ Putting Multimedia to Good Use.
◦ Python and Ruby: the Newer Alternatives.
◦ Registering a Domain Name.
◦ Registering Your Users by Stealth.
◦ RSS: Really Simple Syndication.
◦ Setting Up a Mailing List.
◦ Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer.
◦ Some Places to Go For More Information.
◦ Taking HTML Further. HTML might seem like a simple language for web documents, and to an extent, it is - that's what it was intended to be. If you know what
◦ Taking HTML Further with Javascript. Once you've built your HTML pages, you might need them to do something a little more interactive on the client-side (that
◦ Taking Your Website Mobile.
◦ Text Ads: Unobtrusive Advertising.
◦ The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation.
◦ The Art of the Logo.
◦ The Basics of Web Forms.
◦ The Basics of Web Servers.
◦ The Case Against Flash.
◦ The Confusing World of Web Hosting: Making Your Decision.
◦ The Evils of PDFs.
◦ The Importance of Validation.
◦ The Many Flavours of HTML.
◦ The Smaller, the Better: Avoiding Graphical Overload.
◦ The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes.
◦ The Web Designer's Toolbox.
◦ The Web is Not Paper.
◦ There's More than One Web Browser.
◦ Time for User Testing.
◦ Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper.
◦ Tracking Your Visitors.
◦ Understanding Web Jargon.
◦ Uploading Your Website with FTP.
◦ Using Flash Sensibly.
◦ Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic.
◦ VBScript: Javascript Made Easy.
◦ Websites and Weblogs: What's the Difference?
◦ What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
◦ What You See Isn't Always What You Get.
◦ Which Database is Right for You?
◦ Why Doing It Yourself is Best.
◦ Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away.
◦ Why Word is Bad for the Web.
◦ Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format.
◦ Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions.
◦ Working With Templates.
◦ Writing for the Web.

GoogleSense

Making Money with Articles

Webhosting

RSS
◦ Reading RSS Feeds with an RSS Aggregator