Building web sites

Want to build your own web site but don't know how? Here's my collection of useful bookmarks for running the (20 or so) web sites I maintain myself. I hope you find it useful; please feel free to suggest improvements/additions to my set of recommendations.

• Two basic steps are necessary: registering a domain name and choosing a web hosting package.
• Domain registration is another name for staking out your place in cyberspace. Usually people pay a Domain Registrar to register a domain (e.g. I pay NameCheap to register kiwinerd.net).
• Web hosting is another name for paying someone else to serve up your web pages to visitors when they want to see them. This is most reliably, efficiently and cheaply achieved via paid commercial web hosting, located on servers elsewhere than your office or living room. (DIYers are at the mercy of their internet connection and are responsible for the consequences of hardware failures when running sites themselves on their own machine.)

Domain registration

• Don't do business with GoDaddy. They look cheap, but the customer service is even cheaper. Their advertising is cheaper yet: it is revoltingly misogynistic bottom-of-the-barrel dreck. Take your hard-earned money elsewhere!
• Choose your domain name very carefully. Make sure to consult the list of ICANN accredited domain registrars before paying to register a domain.
• For domain registrations, the shortest billing cycle is normally yearly. For vanilla American domains like kiwinerd.org, bills should be of order <USD$15/year.
• For plain ordinary .ca, [USD16] .org, .net, .com, .info [USD3-10] and .me [USD9] domains, I like NameCheap. (Thanks for the recommendation, Gina Trapani!)
• For .nz [NZD36] (New Zealand) domains and web hosting, I prefer OpenHost.
• For .to [USD50] (Tonga) domains, the sole registrar is TONIC.
• For .io [USD50] (British Indian Ocean Territory) domains, I use NIC.IO
• For .ly [USD75] (Libya) domains, I use Libyan Spider.

Note:

1. Prices were valid at time of writing with providers listed but may have changed.
2. If you are interested in switching to NameCheap, the code SWITCH2NC may still work. It worked for me. :-)

Web hosting

• For entry-level (shared) commercial web hosting packages, expect bills under $10/month.
• Service levels (99.x% uptime?) and tech support (response in n business days? continuity of personnel?) matter greatly. In addition, quality of service is time-dependent: it can change if the circumstances of the company change. So, if you take just one piece of advice from me then let it be this: avert your eyes from discounts that lock you in for long time periods and buy web hosting services on a monthly basis. That way, if the web host fails to measure up when you need them to, you can change providers relatively painlessly.
• For free hosting on one domain including a script, try 000webhost.com. For people really really concerned about privacy and/or free speech, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net offers very low rates for sites with small disk space and bandwidth needs. For normal purposes, a managed shared plan from ASmallOrange.com is pretty good value for money. GrokThis.net caters nicely to geek enthusiasts. Bigger disk space and bandwidth allocations are offered by Site5.com and ANhosting.com, for sites that aren't too popular.
• For popular web sites, I wholeheartedly recommend MediaTemple.net. Their grid hosting rocks, and VPS options available at the next rung up their pricing ladder are affordable.

Authoring web pages

• Never use Microsoft products to make web pages. Learn XHTML and CSS. If HTML and CSS are completely new to you, start with NVu, which lets you work on the HTML and also switch easily to a WYSIWYG view. (Remember: people who use only WYSIWYG editors rarely learn to code!)
• Humanity benefits from inclusion of persons who happen to have disabilities, as well as able-bodied folks. So study the W3C accessibility specifications. Note: if you are under-confident in writing W3C-compliant web pages (hint: newbies and typical Microsoft users, this is you!), then please do the decent thing: use the free online W3C HTML validator tool and CSS validator tool on every page you author. Every time.
• For a blog or small site, use the lean mini-CMS WordPress.
• For a CMS (content management system), people seem to like Drupal or Joomla most often. Plone, which is based on Python, is more secure and preferred by many large organizations (including our own Department of Physics at the University of Toronto).

 

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  Last updated: 20100209