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jwsinchin

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There was a time when I considered myself highly tech-savvy: about ten years ago. The world has moved on an my brain has moved backwards.

 

I find it extremely surprising that I can't find anything on the internet that tells me the basics in a step by step way.

 

Let's establish what I am trying to do here, and assume that I am an idiot.

 

First up, I want to buy a domain name. The domain names I want will be a .asia name. As near as I can gather this will cost me $19.99 for one year.

 

My understanding is this payment entitles me to use the domain name for one year.

What happens at the end of that year? What guarantees of future prices do I have? Who have I actually paid this money to? Who 'owns' this name (this non-existent name) right now? Where does the money go?

 

 

 

Having purchased my domain name it needs to be hosted somewhere. I actually don't want any functionality at all. I am running a catering business. I want to show some menus, some links to reviews, happy customer comments, some prices, contact me. No sales, no sign ups, no interactions. Traffic to the site will come exclusively from the domain name on my business card and Craigs list type ads which I will stick up. There is no need whatsoever for any SEO, I'm not having adwords. Nada. Just five pages of texts and pictures, some downloadable menus and my phone number/email address.

 

Even paying $5 a month to host such a thing seems to me to be a very expensive sledge hammer to crack a very cheap little nut.

 

Obviously a solution to the problem is to use something like a free blog, but I'm in china which is problematic and I want the site to be called www.site.com or www.site.asia - i don't want to be part of blog.user/a/site.co.org.com/bollocks.

What is the cheapest and most efficient way of hosting a tiny little site?

 

 

 

My original intention was to simply use one of those very low functionality drag and drop type site building tools that come with the hosting, but there are almost invariably catches and costs involved with such tools. Nonetheless they still provide most of what I need.

 

Should I look for a good idiot site builder and accept the limitations?

Could I, starting from scratch, do all I need to do on Wordpress for example, within two days?

 

(I actually know and understand a fair bit of HTML in a general knowledge kind of way, and used to be quite a quite skilled BASIC programmer about the time Bill Gates was actually writing code himself).

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You need to buy a domain name from a company like http://www.ukreg.com/ where it will tell you if the domain name you want is still available (ie no one owns it at present). It will also tell you how many years you will buy. The prices haven't changed for many years. You give your credit card details and email address and get a reminder before they take the renewal when the first period is due to run out.

 

You need a ftp service to upload your page code to a hosting service.

 

You then need a hosting service to take your page code and show it online. You will also be able to create a large number of email addresses from your domain name using the hosting service.

 

There are some general notes about the above here:-

http://www.wickham43.net/generaladvice.php#hosting

 

It's better to have the domain name provider, hosting service and ISP with different companies. It saves a lot of trouble if you have a problem with one and need to move your account. You won't want to lose your domain name if you want to move your hosting service or change your ISP.

 

You can use WYSIWYG "What you see is what you get" programs to make a page development easy for a beginner, like Coffeecup

http://www.coffeecup.com/freestuff/

but it's better to learn HTML and CSS to code your own page. You can use Worpress.com for some blog templates to edit or use Wordpress.org which is more complicated but you can then make your own page or blog without using a template. There are others if you Google "Free website templates".

Edited by Wickham
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