My friends, it has come to this. Many have asked for help and now I will walk you through it all, even without knowledge of coding you will be able to create a website in just one hour after reading this.

Say you have already grown tired of your Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.com blogs and you want to move up the scale. What do you do next? Yes, you read this guide!

Remember, you can start your own blog/website now for as low as $10!

Things to know:

Before anything else, there are some small details that you will need to think about. Do you want to have a totally free website that has a fixed set of features? You probably want more power and the option tp tweak things, but are you willing to pay for these options?

First you need to decide whether to create a self-hosted website or not.

Free websites are hosted under a parent domain. For example, there are a lot of websites, or in this case blogs, out there that are used by people for their private ramblings like sampyourname.wordpress.com or testwebsite.blogger.com. These blogs are totally free, but the irony is you really do not have the freedom of bending it to your will. There are limitations involved. But the good thing here is that they are totally reliable and free, also you won’t need any technical knowledge of HTML and CSS, everything is already designed for you.

If your goal is to keep an online diary for your personal life or craft, just the basic things, then using free website/blog services like WordPress.com and Blogger.com, or even Tumblr.com, is highly suggested. You can keep your files safe, no worrying about down time, and most of all they’re totally free. But since they’re free, your site will always have the service’s name (site.blogger.com) attached to your domain and it doesn’t look very professional.

If your goal is to appear strong and professional, and have more control over most things, then your best option is to host a website yourself. Unlike a free website, a self-hosted website requires some technical knowledge, and that is the point of this whole guide.

When should you self-host a website? As mentioned, when you want to have a professional look and feel to your site. Most likely they will know that you are serious about running that website and updating it, since you’re paying for it. Most self-hosted websites are owned by people who are using it for their business, either to promote their skill and services or to make money with it. Just like 1stwebdesigner.com. This is exactly the reason why I decided to write this guide, because people with WordPress.com and Blogger.com blogs have contacted us about shifting to a .com blog. Admittedly, I only replied to a couple of them briefly pointing them to the correct services and websites to read. But now it is different, to avoid further confusing our first time readers I have written a guide to solve this problem!

If you’re still serious about creating a self-hosted website and spending some money, then continue reading.

Before Purchasing Anything

Before you purchase anything, please be sure that you have already decided on what to do. I know that many of the people that will read this are considering it and are not entirely sure about spending money. I know some students both here in the Philippines and elsewhere who are considering spending money to get a website, some have failed and regretted their decision.

Ask yourself, do you need a premium website design?

Choose a Content Management System (CMS)

As the name implies, CMS is software that manages a website’s content. This is actually one of the best inventions of all time. I daresay that 90% of websites in existence today are built over a CMS. Websites like 1stwebdesigner, TheNextWeb, TechCrunch, and a lot more.

I won’t delve too much into what a CMS is, since you’ll more than likely end up using WordPress. 1stwebdesigner is using WordPress to manage all of the photos, articles, and plugins used in this website. Without WordPress it would actually be hard to grow it as big as it is now. But this is just my opinion.

You can, however, choose a different CMS depending on your preferences.

Check out:

• 17 Free Content Management Systems For Better Content Handling
• Showcase of Small But Useful Content Management Systems

Choose a Domain Name and Web Host

Technically, you should be looking for a Domain Registrar to register a Domain name of your choosing. Usually domain names and hosting are purchased together, but in case you want to find cheaper solutions you can buy them separately.

Suggested Web Hosts

These are web hosting companies that I have firsthand experience with. No matter what you do, do not go to GoDaddy.

Below are three of my recommended web hosts. The process is linear. First you will be prompted to select a domain name of your choosing (the name of your website), then the package type, some add-ons, and finally the checkout process where you will pay.

HostGator –  cheap and has a one-click-install for WordPress and other CMS’s. The cheapest plan boasts unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, and hosts one domain. The main take-away for HostGator is that you can actually host your website here for only $0.01 for one month! Provided you have already purchased a domain name which can cost from $8 to $10. Succeeding monthly bills would be around $8. But you can host your website here for one year for only $75.

Use coupon code: “1stwebdesigner” without the “” to get a $9.94 off of your bill!

Currently hosting 1 website here, no problems so far.

WPWebHost – priced just a little higher than HostGator, but the service is absolutely stunning. Their customer support can solve just about anything you can throw at them related to WordPress. One-click-install for WordPress is also available.

Hosting 1 website here too, still happy with it.

ASmallOrange –  for as low as $25 a year you can host a website. For $25 you will get 150MB of disk space and 4.5GB monthly bandwidth. Not bad if you’re planning on a text-based website with few images.

Use coupon code: “1stwebdesigner” without the “” to get a 15% discount!

Also happy with ASmallOrange.

After choosing your web host it’s time to wait. Yes, you need to wait for some time, at best your account is activated within 10 minutes, at worst it will be available after 48 hours (but trust me, I haven’t experienced this yet).

After your account has been activated, an email from the service should be sent to you with the account information with all of the login details for FTP, MySQL, cPanel, and some links to your dashboard. For now just focus on the cPanel.

Setting Up WordPress

First Step: Login onto your Control Panel

HostGator Control Panel

This is what HostGator’s control panel looks like. Do not worry, if you think this is too much to handle and there’s too many icons to click, you only need to worry about one..wait, no, you don’t need to worry at all.

That one icon you need to find? It’s the QuickInstall, just scroll down until you can see this:

After clicking QuickInstall you should see the image below. To the left is a list of software you can install, but our main goal now is to install WordPress. It’s the third item to the left. Just click on it and it will prompt you to continue, simply click on “Continue”.

After this you will receive an email with your login details for your WordPress dashboard. In order to login, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will then be prompted with a login form. Just fill in the form and you’re good to go.

WPWebHost Control Panel

This is how WPWebHost’s control panel looks like.

In order to install WordPress, find Softaculous:

Click on it and a page similar to the screenshot below will load.

Click Blogs and the following will appear. Click on where the red arrow is pointing at.

Then the following page will load, and all you need to do is click the blue button saying “Install”.

Everything onwards is pretty easy to understand. A form will appear, asking for some information. I will no longer post a screenshot of it here because you will not need to change anything. Just change the Admin Account details for your user name and password, and an email address so that the system can send your details.

After this you will receive an email with your login details for your WordPress dashboard. In order to login, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will then be prompted with a login form. Just fill in the form and you’re good to go.

ASmallOrange Control Panel

If you notice, most of the control panels look the same with only minor changes on the software/services available.

Once you can see the image above, scroll down until you find Fantastico De Luxe.

Click Fantastico De Luxe and you’ll be redirected to the page below. Click on WordPress, pointed by the amazing red arrow.

Click on “New Installation”.

Then you will be redirected to this page. Just fill in the user name and password, an email address and choose the domain you want to install WordPress to. Don’t forget to read!

After this you will receive an email with your login details for your WordPress dashboard. In order to login, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will then be prompted with a login form. Just fill in the form and you’re good to go.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed WordPress by navigating through your web host’s control panel!

At this point everything is pretty much finished. But you will need to install a theme and some plugins to get your blog rolling!

Second Step: Configuring Themes

Why do you need to install themes? What are themes? Themes are like clothing for your website, each having their own design and features that you can use. There are hundreds of free themes out there that you can use for free, but don’t expect many features from them. Most likely if you are willing to spend more for the best themes you’ll go for premium themes.

Choose and download Free Themes here:

• Hot WordPress Themes For Freelancers For Personal Branding
• Graph Paper Press
• WordPress Free Themes Directory
• Fresheezy
• See more here (this is no longer updated, but most of the links shown here are still working)

For Premium Themes:

• 20 Premium WordPress eCommerce Themes
• 40 Premium Magazine WordPRess Themes
• The World’s Best Corporate WordPress Themes You Can Actually Afford to Buy
• 50+ WordPress Themes for Video BLoggers (contains Free and Preimum themes)
• ElegantThemes
• ThemeForest

Installing Themes

First login to your WordPress dashboard by going to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will be greeted by this sweetheart, which you should familiarize yourself with because you’ll be seeing it often. Hover on Appearance and click on Themes.

It is important to note that all the themes that you will be downloading are zipped/rar-ed files. Just keep them that way. When the page loads, click on Install Themes and then click on Upload. Happily navigate through your folders to find the theme you downloaded, select it then upload it. After activating it, check your website and it should have a new design.

Congratulations! You have just installed a new theme! Now, what comes next is also crucial to your website’s success: installing plugins.

Third Step: Setting up Plugins

First let’s talk about the necessary plugins that you need to download and install. Note that this is only based on my preference. You can find your own plugins to install, but I’m just giving you an idea as to what kind of plugins to use. So, let’s begin!

Needed Plugins:

• Digg Digg or SharebBar for the social media buttons.
• All in One SEO Pack for SEO purposes. In the most simplest of all explanations, it enhances your visibility on Google.
• Quick Cache to speed up your page loads.
• Google Analycticator to easily install your Google Analytics to your website. Don’t have an account yet? Simply go to Google Analytics and sign up for one! By using this service you will know how many people are visitng your website, from where, and which content is visited by the readers.
• Search 1stwebdesigner for more plugins.

How to Install a Plugin

It’s very easy to install a plugin, either by uploading or searching the WordPress.org plugin directory. First go to the Plugins page by clicking on Plugins.

If you have downloaded a plugin, then you will need to click on Upload and upload the zipped file. If you want to search for the plugin, simply input the name on the search bar and search for the plugin. If you will use the search function, you will be greeted by this:

Simply click “Install Now” and the plugin will be installed. Don’t forget to check the Details to see if the plugin is compatible with your current WordPress version. Talking about that, be sure to always keep your WordPress updated! After installing, just activate the plugin and if settings are available, adjust the settings to your preference.

Congratulations! You have just installed your first plugin! Next and final step would be to add your content!

It’s not a website if it doesn’t have content. Be sure to write valuable information that people can actually use. Never steal content from other websites!

What do you think about this guide?

As always, don’t forget to share this with your friends who are in need, instead of telling them to “Google it!” And also share tips and techniques. Did I make an error somewhere? Please feel free to point them out!

If you are having trouble just write a comment below and I will be glad to help you. :)

What is DNS?

That is the customary question that we got to answer when we are discussing something as vast as DNS. Basically, DNS (Domain Name System) is responsible for translating human friendly website URLs like www.1stwebdesigner.com to computer readable IP addresses like 148.68.30.27 (just an example). You know, our mind cannot remember combination of such digits so we devised a system which helps convert these IP addresses to English names and vice versa.

Please understand that DNS isn’t a localized system where all the IP addresses corresponding to every website present on this planet is stored. If that was the case then an unimaginable amount of care would be required to keep such a huge database working. Also, having a localized DNS would be against the distributed character of the Internet.

Rather, DNS is a distributed service which is actually a collective group of name servers (which we call as “nameserver” in Internet lingo). These nameservers constantly refer to each other in order to stay updated with the changes that are rolled out every now and then. The process sounds simple but it is quite complex.

So, every website has a nameserver?

Well, technically speaking, yes! Though it’s a different case that one nameserver will be used for multiple websites. Otherwise, we would end up having 100 million nameservers for 100 million domains – which makes no sense. Like, I host a domain of mine on DreamHost.com. So, they give me nameservers like ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com and ns3.dreamhost.com. Now, DreamHost is giving these nameservers to almost every client that they have. So, these three nameservers basically have almost all the IP address to URL details of every DreamHost client.

A basic flow of request on the Internet

When you type Google.com in your browser then a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes before you get to see the Google homepage. The image below tries to explain the flow of request.

Let me try to make it bit more clearer:

• When you visit a website URL via your browser then Windows will look for the corresponding IP address stored in the nameservers of your ISP.
• If the IP address is found then the request is directly sent to that IP address henceforth reducing the execution time.
• If the IP address is not found locally then the request is sent to the cloud of Internet and your browser waits for the virtual world to do its job.
• Every website has a nameserver associated with itself. Henceforth, that particular nameserver receives that request and sends it to the respective IP address.
• If that nameserver does not have the IP address details then it communicates with other nameservers and they with others. The request flows in the Internet till correct IP details are attained.
• Once the IP address is known then the request is sent to the particular IP address and data is served.

What is “48 hours delay”?

Usually, when you are about to change the nameservers for your domain or when you are hosting a fresh domain then your hosting company will tell you that it might take up to 48 hours for the information to be updated. Technically speaking, they are correct. It might take up to 48 hours for all nameservers on this planet to connect with every other nameserver and keep themselves in sync. You see, it’s a huge virtual world out there. But, my personal experience says that it usually takes less than 24 hours for the global update to complete. Still, you should consider the 48 hour delay in your time plan before you make any changes.

The below image via Wikipedia will give you an idea of hierarchical DNS, organized into zones, each served by a nameserver.

How and when does caching occur?

Nice question. You got the information for Google.com request that you had sent some time back. Now, that information is saved in the local ISP’s nameservers so that next time your request isn’t sent to third-party nameservers. But, after a stipulated time period these nameservers contact other nameservers so that their information isn’t outdated. This is where the term TTL comes into play.

What is TTL?

TTL (or Time To Live) is the time period that comes in along with the IP address info. This time period information is sent by the third-party nameserver along with the IP address. The value is usually in seconds and it is more like a suggestion from the third-party nameserver that you can stay away from me for X seconds and still stay updated. Come back after X seconds and I will pass on the latest information.

Usually the TTL value is 12 hours or 24 hours. This can be set to a custom number as and when required to reduce traffic.

Other types of DNS lookups

Once DNS started to serve the IP address lookup (as discussed above), then it was time to expand. DNS was later on used for other type of lookups, two of which we will discuss below:

• A Record – A Record lookup is something that we have already discussed. The IP address lookup is actually the A Record lookup for DNS.
• MX Record – MX (which is acronym for “mail exchanger”) is used for email address lookups. Usually when a tool tries to send an email to mail box related to your domain then it will look for MX record of your domain. This MX record will have another domain (something like mail.yourdomain.com) as its value. Now the A Record for this MX record will be checked to get the target IP address.
• CNAME Record – CNAME (stands for Canonical Name Record) is actually an alias for another domain name. This comes in handy when you want to use your own domain and data from another website. Like, during the ancient Internet Age (when blogspot.com was luxury), blogspot.com had a feature (they still have it) where you can use your own domain (yourdomain.com) instead of using the bogspot’s sub-domain for your blogspot hosted blog. In this case all that Google would do was ask you to change the CNAME of yourdomain.com to your blogspot’s sub-domain and the job is done. Whenever one would visit yourdomain.com then the data from your blogspot’s sub-domain will be delivered although the sub-domain won’t be visible in address bar.

Other usage of DNS

Other then the three lookups that I discussed above, DNS can be used for many other functions like:

• As I discussed before, domain names and nameservers do not have a one-to-one matching. This gives the hosting companies the chance for shared hosting and save a lot on money invested. Here, multiple domains can result into one IP address. This means one machine can host many websites. Additionally, one domain can point to multiple IP addresses. This helps in redundancy and high availability.
• The DNS system can be used to save and share IP addresses of blacklisted email hosts. Such databases are available for free in order to fight spam.
• These days software makers save the version of a software in the DNS database. This way the client machine connects to find out the latest version of the software available. It connects to the software maker’s server only if a new version is available. This helps in reducing the requests that client machines get.

Long story short, Eleven2 just relaunched their business, redesigned their website, added different plans improving greatly and today I am sharing their story with you! And be quick to get your free hosting account – only 100 packages available!!!

Eleven2 Story

January the 3rd is when we launched our new website design. It had taken 5 months to build, starting from the beginning of August 2010. Originally, we wanted to have the whole site done by September 21st, but that deadline came and went, as we continued to find aspects in our design that we wanted to change and improve, thus bringing us forward to the end of the year, and seeing as January is our biggest month, we thought we could enter 2011 with a brand new site!

Comparing the oldsite to our brand new current site, the oldsite was a lot more bland (colour wise), and used 100% widths, where as our newsite all fits perfectly within our 940px container, and everything is aligned perfectly to the user has a great experience when browsing our site. Check out the homepage of our oldsite, compared to the brand new homepage on our newsite…

(old website design)

(new website design)

Where Did We Improve?

We wanted to create a new website that focused on the end user, making the user interface easy to use, and making it easy for the customer to find information about any of our services! To do this we decided to split our site into sections with pages underneath it. We implemented an Ajax dropdown menu to do this…

We also have redesigned out back-end billing panel, so that clients can manage all their domains, hosting and services with us easy and efficiently. This was thanks to Jon Eichler who spent ages battling with WHMCS.

I am extremely proud of our brand new all In one signup page, where users can pick their hosting type, then filter down to package and location. It uses alot of Ajax, and we put alot of work into this page.

Everything on the site has changed, including all our pricing tables. We put alot of work into research on this front, making sure all our services we’re displayed beautifully, and making all the information easy to compare to other packages within that product band.

We have also added global server locations to all of our reseller packages. People can now choose where they want their server to be hosted, from London UK, Dallas Texas, and Singapore Asia. We offered this on all our shared hosting plans, so we thought it would be a good idea to add it to our popular reseller hosting too.

We also have a growing Facebook Page, Twitter Page, and our brand new blog which we are using to keep customers updated on company updates, new product launches and server issues, upgrades etc.

The New Video Tutorials Catalogue

We have also launched a brand new video tutorials catalogue with the newsite, which contains over 1,000 video tutorials all split up into sections and subcategories. We cover everything from cPanel, WHMCS to Paypal and WordPress Integration. This is another step forward to going the extra mile to our customers.

When users click on a tutorial, the video opens in a lightbox allowing for fast video toggling between each video in a series.

What’s Happening Backstage at eleven2?

Behind the doors at eleven2 right now, we have so much going on, and we are all so excited to enter 2011 with all the staff on board to take eleven2 further and offer much more to our customers. With the launch of our FREE iPhone app on the iTunes App store, we also have a Google Android App in the works, and will hopefully soon go even further when the company grows and offer apps to all Major SmartPhone platforms including Symbian and Blackberry OS.

We also want to perhaps sometime before the Q2 of the year create a mobile website, and if the iPad 2 really takes off, then there will perhaps be an app for that too. It all depends on the way technology goes, and making our services more accessible to fit current trends.

The Giveaway – FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE

We are giving away 100 x Shared hosting packages FREE for 4 months! The hosting package you will be on is the S-100 package, which gives you 1GB of Storage Space and 15GB Monthly Bandwidth transfer. There is no limit on how many websites you can host too!

You can even pick where you want to be hosted. We have servers in Dallas (TEXAS), London (UK), and Singapore (ASIA).

We are giving these packages away on a first come first serve basis! There’s only 100, so HURRY! All you have to do is to go the following link, click web hosting, choose your location for the S-100 plan and click signup. Remember on the checkout porcess, choose the monthly billing term, and enter the coupon 1stwebdesignerFREE.

http://www.eleven2.com/signup/

Checkout Coupon: 1stwebdesignerFREE

If you don’t like us after 4 months of free hosting, you can cancel your account anytime.

If you missed out…

There are only 100 FREE accounts to giveaway on a first come first serve basis, so if you go to the checkout and the coupons have all been used up, then you can always use the coupon 1stwebdesigner to get 35% off your first payment term on any of our hosting packages! Which includes shared, reseller and cloud!

35% Off Coupon: 1stwebdesigner

If you can relate with anything I’ve written above, then this article will be a great time and life saver for you! I’ll explain several ways to launch a new website for free or extremely cheap! Quality doesn’t need to suffer because you don’t have a few thousand dollars to spend on unique website design coding or extremely cool features. If you’re going to launch a new start-up – it’s always smart to start small, start with just core functions to see how people respond to your creation! Once you see they enjoy it and there is a market, then you can consider seriously investing  some money on improving your site. It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money when just you’re just starting out.

With my advice you will be able to create a new website really fast! If you have a great idea you don’t want to have to spend hours working on it before you get to test it in action! Website creation doesn’t need to be a confusing and time consuming process! The main thing is to get your idea out there! Let’s get started!

In this article we’ll focus on:

1. Basic solutions to launch small projects online for free or really cheap.
2. Slightly more advanced solutions for entrepreneurs who want to test their new idea fully while spending only a little money on it.

Free Solutions Versus Paid Ones

There’s always certain advantages and disadvantages in everything we do or use, this principle applies to website creation as well. Free options aren’t always bad and paid options aren’t always better. You just have to know what strings to pull to find the best deals on the internet. Well, you won’t need to pull any strings here, because I will share with you the most effective solutions.

Advantages of Free Solutions

Image via CrunchBase

Well, if you are on a tight budget (or even better – no budget, just a dream)  you can always count on resources that are offered for free by their creators. There are resources out there that are premium-like in quality but are free. Why free? Don’t they want to see dollars on their bank accounts? Of course they do, but the thing about giving away free softwares, logos, themes and other deliverables is pure marketing to grab attention and gain exposure.  We can seriously benefit from such freebies too regularly searching for premium free resources.

For example, I rarely buy any icons, because there are so many free ones – take FindIcons, IconFinder websites for example.

Disadvantages

There are many free resources available but with most of them you’re either going to sacrifice quality, aesthetics and with themes/templates you cannot be sure if  code is well written. If you’re getting something for free, you often cannot expect to receive good support and you cannot expect to receive the highest quality. There’s a quote that goes “if you are good at something, don’t do it for free,” and you guessed it! Beginners and intermediate designers/developers quite often provide free resources because they’re not at the level yet where they can sell everything they design or develop. The good thing about this system is that though they may not make money they build their reputation and potential customer base by providing quality resources for free.

To summarize – yes, there are a lot of amazing free solutions available and some are high quality. While free is good – you can run into problems such as overuse(everyone using the same trendy free pack of social media icons), no brand recognition, looking cheap because without the necessary knowledge you may not use resources as they are intended to be used. My opinion here is that you can surely use free graphic design resources because what you see is what you get! However you should be careful picking up free themes and templates because often they aren’t very well documented or supported and you may encounter unexpected problems as bugs, compatibility issues with different plugins or modifications you will want to do.

I still consider free solutions to be a pretty good starting point if you don’t want (or can’t) spend any money on it. To explore more about free resources and their pros and cons, read this excellent article by Jared – Can Free Design Resources Be Exemplary?

Zilch Experience in Web Dev?

For people who are not into development but want to have a website for a business or for personal use there are many options to choose from, both free and paid. Free themes, free hosting, and free anything has its downsides and would not work for a blog like 1WD or for e-commerce. Good thing the citizens of the information age, and of the internet, are good enough to offer a free taste which can work for both people who have the skill to develop a website and for people with zero experience with such.

Now, there are tons of free services out there which offer good things, but here I will focus on things that I have used firsthand.

The first thing to ask yourself is…what is this site going to be for? What’s your goal? – personal diary, portfolio site, just a fun project, serious blogging project, startup, website to support your application or software you have, forum, e-commerce site? You need to set clear goals at first!

Basic free solutions for beginners : Hosted Websites

This solution is very good if your goal is just to have some internet presence, have a personal diary or you want to build a small community for friends, work colleagues or maybe just a fan club. However I will list the advantages and disadvantages of this solution, because I really do not recommend it if you have any plans to expand. You’ll understand what I mean once you’ve read pros and cons:

Advantages

• Well, it’s free or super cheap!
• Updated automatically – no maintenance issues at all! You don’t have to worry about updates and any compatibility issues
• Free hosting – you don’t have to worry about your site being online, you don’t have to solve any technical issues
• Easy to setup and launch – it will take just a few minutes for you to launch such website, no previous experience needed!
• Search engine friendly – many marketers use those free website solutions to promote their main site! Why? Because usually those big blog platforms have excellent rankings in search engines, you can get ranked extremely fast because of that.

Disadvantages

• Little control over configuration, design and customization – your chances to pick appropriate templates are limited, you can use only a few supported plugins. It’s hard to build/design something that stands out from the crowd there.
• Very hard to monetize – Well, these sites will be monetized, but not by you! It will be monetized by those big companies who own the site, because they need to cover their own expenses. Basically you’re paying them in both cases – you pay them cash or they earn some cash with ads.
  

  Image via CrunchBase

• No branding- many hosted websites will look the same. Your  website will also look cheap because of the ads the hosted website platform will implement automatically.
• Limited resources – while hosting may be free, many platforms have limitations for bandwidth and space usage. You won’t encounter these problems early on
• You don’t own the content – this is the most serious one – if one day the site decides to stop working and they change their policies, you could lose your content and it’s usually difficult to transfer to your own website later on.

Ok, now you know some of the things you may deal with if you choose this option!

For hosted blogging platforms I recommend you choose from Posterious, WordPress, Tumblr.

There is also a very interesting Flash website creation solution I encountered some time ago so I am going to talk about it a bit too, because it’s great for beginner users:

Flash or Not?

To help you decide, first you need to know the purpose of your website. Is the purpose to have an online portfolio so that employers and potential clients will see you and be impressed? If  that’s the case, I believe that a flash website is a good choice because it provides flexibility when it comes to creativity. If the goal is to start an online store or a blog it would be best to go for a more dynamic solution, one of my recommendations above may be better suited to your needs.

Flash Website (Wix)

The good thing about having a flash website is the creative freedom. Colors, effects, and animation is not a problem. A Flash-based website will save you the trouble of learning jQuery and other languages/scripts for added effects. Here’s the rub, if you have a slow internet connection like mine you won’t fully enjoy the website. Opening a light-weight flash website on my end takes up to 30 to 50 seconds. Not fun at all.

There is a free flash website builder, which allows people without any knowledge of programming and designing to come up with a new website via drag and drop. Wait, drag and drop? Yes, that easy. Wix allows its users to create a flash-based website using a very simple process. Trust me when I say that the registration process only took me 5 seconds and I’m good to go with my website. Alright, I’m dropping it now, it’s free. But if you are the meticulous type and serious about it you can always upgrade and have your own domain name.

With Wix you get to choose from a wide selection of free layouts and edit them at your whim. Literally drag and drop, you can manage information with just a few clicks.

See their gallery for a full list of what you can do with Wix.

Quality

The quality of the design is amazing, with its wide selection of layouts you can’t help but notice the high quality while most are free to use. Many of the design elements are drag and drop, no programming or designing skills needed.

Drag and Drop

This eliminates the need to code and design, all you have to do is choose, drag, and drop. Very user friendly. Menus are easy to understand, you won’t get confused trying to figure out what things do. Anything that you can see is clickable and editable, no worries if you don’t like the color, it only takes a few seconds and clicks to change it to suit your taste!

Below is a screenshot of how layouts are edited.

Wix is best for people who are on a budget but need to be online. Best for portfolios and personal websites. As mentioned, there’s an option to upgrade your plan from free to premium where you will get your own domain and other features that you will love. I like this approach because you can easily switch and see benefits immediately  (no ads, own domain, hosting, support, analytics and so on).

Wix Sample Websites

Remember, you can build your website via drag and drop using Wix, no programming required!

I don’t want a flash website! What else?

Up to now I really do not know what to call it: standard website, traditional website, HTML website, etc.. Whatever, what’s important is that you know what I mean: not flash.

During my free time I am developing a website, although I’m not that good at coding. My real problem? My design skills are terrible. Free solution? Minimalist design. I’m not saying that minimalism is easy, I’m pretty sure I’d still be troubled by it. If only I had the money I’d buy something from ThemeForest or hire a designer friend.

“I have a design but I can’t code”

Relax! There is a great solution for that. If you have a design (in generally accepted image format) and you want it coded in 48 hours one thing comes to mind: Code My Concept. Although it does not come cheap, at least you are assured that your design will be hand coded in valid HTML and CSS within 48 hours. Saves you the time and effort, and it’s professionally done too.

An alternative is Code Canyon where you can literally purchase scripts. Just like Theme Forest, rest assured that the codes and scripts delivered there are properly moderated and are of high quality. All for a fair price.

Some of the things you can buy:

Many people have trust issues when it comes to these type of things, 1stwebdesigner is willing to help you find a designer or a coder among our 24,000 plus followers on Twitter. We can tweet your needs if you need it, how does that sound?

Shopping for code and plugins is very easy, very helpful too if you are on a tight budget, or time won’t allow you to hire a developer in time or it’s not within budget. Think of it like building your own computer, buying parts that will complete the whole. That’s how it works.

“I know how to code but I can’t design well”

Aside from Theme Forest where you can purchase web templates, there is Graphic River where you can choose from a wide selection of stock graphics ranging from simple icons to a sophisticated prints.

A free solution would be free stock photo sites like sxc.hu or a site like Deviant Art but you can’t expect to find specific web elements to add on your website.

Here are some free things that you can use to build your design:

• 45 Free Design Templates and PSD Files
• 57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions
• 38 jQuery And CSS Drop Down Multi Level Menu Solutions

Create Your Own Domain Name

Choosing the right domain name is crucial task, because you’ll build your whole branding around it. There is a problem though, it’s very hard to get a good .com domain which is still free. Actually there is a serious problem in getting any good domain names at all! To help you through this process I suggest you try this nifty website – Domainr. It’s a site to bookmark, that’s for sure!

Well, I also suggest you use the site GoDaddy to register your domain. You can get domains really cheap from as low as  7.49$ per year! They also have a pretty good suggestion system to find related domains if the name you really wanted is taken already. Their backend system may seem confusing at first, but I’ve had positive experiences with this site, so I can really recommend it.

Choosing a Web Host

Catchy “Unlimited” bandwidth and disk space, several hosting services offer monthly payments from $4 to $10 for shared hosting. What does it mean?

In truth there is no such thing as Unlimited disk space and Unlimited bandwidth, the service provider assumes that you won’t use too much (which is true most of the time) so they use the word to their leverage. Is it any good? It depends on how you will use it, of course. For a personal website or an online portfolio it is more than okay if you want your own domain. I use GoDaddy and so far I have not experienced any problems, except for the fact that their control panel is a huge mess. Hostgator is one of the cheapest and good hosting services too. Both start from $4 (as of writing this) for shared hosting and both offer VPS. Dreamhost’s record is near flawless, you can google up “Dreamhost reviews” and use your instincts to see if the review is a sham or not. I know three people who use Dreamhost and they say it’s flawless, of ourse it does not come cheap.

1stwebdesigner is hosted by Eleven2. Is it any good? It speaks for itself. 1WD receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and it’s still doing fine. If your website will have great traffic in the future you may want to start with a good host to avoid the hassle of transferring to a new host when everything is in motion. You don’t want to lose even 30 minutes of uptime.

If your goal, on the other hand, entails great traffic and thousands of users every day you might want to opt for a Full-featured hosting. For a couple of months now I have seen many people cuss about their hosting services because of hours of downtime on their blogs. Probing deeper I learned that most use shared hosting. In my opinion you can’t trust shared hosting when it comes to big businesses online. A solution would be to shift from shared hosting to full-featured hosting.

Quick Review:

Hosted Website Solutions

• For hosted blogging platforms I recommend you to choose from Posterious, WordPress, Tumblr;
• Easy site builder for a flash website you can use Wix;

Website Design

• Theme Forest offers high quality,unique and very affordable themes.

Code Shopping

• You can shop for codes at Code Canyon
• You can go to Code My Concept for PSD to HTML conversion

Hosting And domains

• GoDaddy -register domains with ease.
• Eleven2 Hosting – great hosting 1WD uses for a year already!

Related articles

• 45 Top and Most Popular Articles of 2010 in Design Community (1stwebdesigner.com)
• 8 Easy Solutions to Create Question & Answer Websites (1stwebdesigner.com)
• Options to Consider When Looking for Stock Photos: Free vs Paid Solutions (1stwebdesigner.com)

One of the hardest parts when you already found a buyer is transferring the website to the buyer with very small downtime. So far I haven’t encountered any article describing how to do this so I’ve decided to write one and share what I know.

1. Know the buyer

I know, I know, this phrase has become a cliche. However, the more you apply it, the more you realize how potent it is. Same with selling websites.

Ask the buyer 2 main things when you transfer the website to him:

• His domain name register. In my example, the buyer wanted to use NameCheap (which was the same I used)! This information saved me money (it costs around $8 to transfer a domain name.) How? I just contacted NameCheap and asked them whether it’s possible to transfer a new domain to another Namecheap user and they told me a free way to do it.

• His hosting. Common sense thinking here. If your hosting is different from his hosting, you want to know the name of the hosting company so in case you encounter a problem during the transferring process you can contact their live support (many hosting companies have 24/7 online live support.) In my case, both of us used Hostgator

2. Transferring the website: Data first, DNS records last

The last step of the overall process should be changing the DNS records. In Namecheap, they look like this:

The first step should be transferring the data of the website, so when you’re ready to transfer the DNS, the exactly same data is there just on a different server.

Here’s how you do that with WordPress:

• First, create an add-on domain using cPanel. I don’t recommend for the buyer to set up the domain I’m about to sell as the primary one for the sake of clarity. Again, I don’t recommend to set up the site as a primary domain. I made this mistake when trying to transfer my public records site from my other host. I couldn’t access the site at the beginning and had many problems afterward. Just don’t do the same please if you want to have 0 downtime.

• Backup the database. Use WP-DB plugin for WordPress, I’ve tested it and it produces the smallest database size.

• Install WordPress on the new web host as a clean installation (or you can copy all files, see this guide for more information.) I prefer to do a clean install (things can go wrong if you copy all the files and then you’ll have to find the root cause of the problem which is the hard part, with a clean install if a problem appears you usually know the root cause immediately.)

• After you install and configure WordPress, copy the wp-content folder from the old host to the new host. Then restore the database with phpMyAdmin (see instructions). Now you’re done with transferring the overall content and settings.

• Now, you should be able to access the domain at domainame.primarydomain.com. So if you’re trying to transfer 1stwebdesigner.com and the primary domain on your hosting is example.com, then you can access 1stwebdesigner on 1stwebdesigner.example.com. After you get to the homepage, you might get a 404 error when trying to open the posts. You need to update the Permalink structure (just to go Settings > Permalinks and click on ‘update’.) to fix this.

• Go to wp_options using phpMyAdmin and change “siteurl” and “home”. Using our previous example, if you want to transfer 1stwebdesigner.com and the primary domain for the hosting is example.com, you can access 1stwebdesigner on the new host using the URL: 1stwebdesigner.example.com. Now, after you made sure everything is okay and you’re ready to do the DNS transfer, use wp_options and change “siteurl” and “home” from 1stwebdesigner.example.com to 1stwebdesigner.com

• Go to your domain registar (Namecheap, Godaddy or some other one) and change the DNS Servers (see the first screenshot in this article.)

Now you need to wait several hours for the DNS to propagate. After that process is done, you should see your site on the new server. The process of transferring with 0 downtime is done.

To see whether the DNS servers are changed, a good trick I use is to place a simple html file on the old server. For example, I can place example.html on the old server with a simple text in it. I then try to open that file in my browser after few hours. If the file is located, that means the DNS transfer has not yet taken place. If the file is not located, that means the website is already on the new server (which doesn’t have that file.) This is helpful because the you have 2 identical copies on the servers so you need to find a separator like this.

That’s it! This process should be even simpler if you have a static website. If you try to transfer a website with Joomla or Drupal, the process should be a bit different. The basic concepts are the same, however. First transfer the data and then change the DNS servers.

Thanks for reading. How do you transfer websites between different hosts?

Today I am going to tell you my bad experience with one of the leading web hosts of Industry, Dreamhost. After starting with them, I was very happy with their shared servers but things went bad when I moved to Dreamhost PS. My personal tech blog was having so much down times that uptime went to 94% in just 2 weeks and to even surprise you more, it happened after moving to Dreamhost Personal Servers (which are designed to handle big traffic, at least is their words). After so many ticket queries and live chat, there was no solution hence I decided to move to a new web host as Crispy Tech needed a personal server for its traffic.

If you want to keep an eye on your web host, Its very necessary that you use a website monitoring service which notifies you when your website goes down.

Today we have come up with best free website monitoring services which help you to monitor your website. It was easy for me to write an article with 20 website monitoring services but I have only included the best ones which we have actually used before.  So let’s start.

1. Uptime Robot

A Quick Look

• Price: Free
• Number of Sites You can monitor: 50
• Notification Methods: RSS, Twitter, Email, SMS
• Time Interval for each check: 5 Minutes
• Simple yet effective

Uptime robot is one of the finest and completely free website monitoring services. Co Founded by Umut Muhaddisoglu of WebResourcesDepot, Uptime Robot is our personal choice for monitoring on 1stWD.

The monitoring service has no Premium Plans and their free services are more than enough for any web developer. You can monitor 50 websites for free with options of getting notified with:

• Twitter DM
• RSS
• Email
• SMS.

Pretty awesome. Right?

Uptime Robot checks your website with regular interval of 5 minutes.

In a talk with Umut, he assured us that Uptime Robot will be free till September 2010 and then they will introduce premium plans (In case if they are unable to continue Free Plan) but free plan will still be there with some modifications.  Although the web app is not feature enriched but Its awesome for those who just want the work done with out whistles and bells.

One thing you will fall in love with is the completely Ajaxed interface of Uptime Robot. After signing up, just play with different areas of website and you will enjoy the experience.:)

Missing Features:

We would love to see better support for SMS notifications in UpTime Robot. While writing this review, SMS notifications are not supported World Wide. Another awesome feature would be iPhone/ Android App.

2. Pingdom

A Quick Look

• Price: From Free to 39$/month
• Number of Sites You can monitor: 1 for free
• Notification Methods: RSS, Twitter, Email, SMS
• Time Interval for each check: From 1 Minute to changeable

Pingdom is by far the most comprehensive and enterprise solution for website monitoring services. With all those nifty and expensive plans they also provide the option of a free website monitoring plan which allows you to monitor one website for free.

Pingdom is the biggest guy in thr world of website monitoring services with customers ranging from of Alexa to Mashable.

Pingdom is feature enriched and has its own free iPhone app. With support of Response time tracking, you can also check how your server reponds when it experiences traffic load.

3. Zabbix

Quick Look:

• Self Hosted Solution
• Open Source
• Free

If you are a big fan of Open Source softwares then Zabbix is for you. Its completely free and licensed under GPL v2 which means you are free to do modifications in the core software and pass it on. There are no proprietary restrictions on you.

Zabbix is such a comprehensive tool that a book has been written on it which covers all of its features. There is no pre-hosted version and you will have to install it yourself after downloading it. The tool is pretty complex and I only suggest it for Advanced users.

4. Basic State

A Quick Look

• Price: Free
• Number of Sites You can monitor: Unlimited
• Notification Methods: Email, SMS
• Time Interval for each check: From 1 Minute to changeable

With support of email and SMS notifications, Zabbix is another completely free web monitoring service. You can have unlimited monitors active with Basic state. The web app checks your website’s header with regular intervals of 15 Minutes. Though the home page of basicstate don’t gives a professional look but I have personally tested and was using it before I came to know Uptime Robot.

5. 100 Pulse

A Quick Look

• Price: Free/ Premium Plans
• Number of Sites You can monitor: 2 Websites for Free
• Notification Methods: Email, SMS, Twitter, iGoogle Gadget
• Time Interval for each check: 15 Minutes

100Pulse is another free website monitoring service which comes with an inituitive user interface. The free plan allows you to monitor the status of  two web properties and you will be notified using Twitter, Email and SMS. They also have an option of Google Widget which you can set up on your desktop or iGoogle.

I hope that you liked the article. Which web service do you use for website monitoring? Feel free to share it with us.

1. Media Fire

This service offer a bunch of free, great options and unlimited storage but only 100MB per file.

2. ADrive

One of the best services offering 50 GB free upload!

3. File Savr

Free service without registration required, files are kept forever as they are being downloaded and upload size is 10GB. Very good and fast service as I tested it.

4. File Dropper

Very fresh designed site without any annoying countdown timers or blinking, aggressive advertisements like in MegaUpload or Rapidshare, upload size is 5gb without registration required.

5. FileDen

Also very user friendly and clean website offering 1GB upload size, but also fast download speed. My favorite one actually because of simplicity.

6. FileQube

Upload size is 2GB and service is totally free, one file size is up to 150mb and a lot more nice features as web file manager, different widgets to make Your life easier etc.

7. Send U It

Fast, easy service with two simple steps – upload file up to 100mb and send to friends private link for download. Only thing it expires quickly, You can set expiration up to 1 week.

8.  Easy Share

Pretty great resource allowing You 4 different ways to upload files – web upload, FTP upload, upload with Easy Share software and remote upload – very handy.

Maximum file size per upload is 100MB and unlimited storage and no registration required if You want to just upload file, however for managing files and uploading files from FTP, I suggest to register. Very good service and completely free.

9. zSHARE

The last service I will review is zSHARE  with unlimited upload, but 500mb per file, no registration required and it’s completely free!

There is no limit how long files are kept on the server, but if files are not downloaded for more than 60 days are automatically deleted.

Please share with file hosting services You use too, if You know any. Hope You enjoyed this list!

This is second part of two:

1. 9 Useful Image Hosting Services Reviewed

2. 9 Useful File Hosting Services Reviewed

The same is about images – if You have limited loading speed and space, where You are hosting, You can just choose to upload images at different services so You don’t need to bother Yourself anymore thinking about all those limitations.

And one more example – if You are making site or article not for Yourself – You could use hosting service and in future when cleaning up Your hosting space -  You won’t need to remember what You did in past and which image You can’t delete. I used this kind of service, when I was making free myspace layouts – and hosting images at those services seemed just logical.

I just wanted to list the best and free services You can choose from and think about image uploading little different:

1.Flickr.com

One of the best and known sites, offering photo and now video uploads too.  However if You are using free account – there are limitations about 100MB upload/month. It’s most popular because of huge sharing possibilities – You can share it with Your friends, add/join different groups – it’s big community there. Now they are offering one great software too – Flickr Uploadr 3.0. It’s easy to use and You now can easily drag photos from Your computer right on software, add titles, tags and upload them very fast to Flickr. Nice feature for daily use.

And one more thing – if You are blogging like me – You can easily add image to blog post by configuring blog options and hitting “Blog This” button and many more different features:

2. Photobucket.com

The best service to choose in my opinion. They offer free and pro accounts.

If You haven’t got big traffic and don’t think using daily photobucket.com service, then FREE account will be good solution.

However for serious using or in future I suggest PRO account for 3.95$ month or 39.95$ Year. We used their service myself and was happy about it. At start free account was good solution, but later we just got more than 25gb/month traffic bandwidth, so we upgraded account to PRO and were happy about it. Really great service, especially for daily use.

Pretty great feature is bulk upload - no more uploading images one by one, just select all images (in one folder) You want to upload, hit OK button and job is done!

3.Imageshack.us

It’s great service where You don’t need to even register – just upload image (You can automatically resize it to Your needs – different monitor, avatar, thumbnail sizes etc.), copy one of the given links ( there are 8 different HTML codes for specified image usage) and use it!

This is free service, however if You are really serious using it, consider subscribing to PRO account with several great features.

4. Slide.com

Site offers not only easy image uploading, but great slideshow creation too and FunPix allowing You to easily personalize images with some stickers, graphics, animations and much more. There is few premium services that cost, but image uploading and slideshow creation is unlimited! Upload as many as You want, without spending a single penny!

5. Webshots.com

Just register and upload Your images – Webshots offer free store 1,000 photos + 100 more for each month of membership, stats on 3 of Your albums and even video file adding.

There are few software too as FREE Webshots Desktops allowing to manage Your online photos and Webshots Mobile gives You an access to Webshots via mobile phone.

I use Webshots for high quality photo searching sometimes.  Just check their site to explore more features they offer.

Below is screenshot after uploading an image:

6. Bayimg.com

They offer not only image hosting, but support 140 different formats, max file upload size is 100mb.

This is place where You can upload all of Your images – there is no any kind of censure.

Upload is very easy, image below is self explaining:

7. ImageVenue.com

This service is absolutely free – created especially for bloggers, message board users, and eBay sellers.

Maximum image file size is 3MB and there are no limitations how much images You upload. There are also Online Photo editor allowing to crop, resize, rotate, convert to different image formats etc. very fast and one more thing – You can even use FTP server to upload Your images!

8.XS.to

Nice service, easy to use – allows jpg,jpeg, gif, bmp, png, tif and tiff type fyles. Maximum file size  for GIF is 1mb, 2mb for all other file types.

Maximum 500 files allowed to upload. After upload You can create slideshow or add different effects to Your image.

9. FreeImageHosting.net

FreeImageHosting service is absolutely free – allows to upload GIF, JPG, BMP, and PNG type images, maximum file size is 2.5mb. Registration is not needed, however if You register, it will let you to keep track of Your uploads.

Simple site – and that’s just great because it gets his job done!

This is first part of two:

1. 9 Useful Image Hosting Services Reviewed

2. 9 Great File Hosting Services Reviewed

How are with You? Do You use any image hosting service? If yes, then in which cases?

Comments will be appreciated!