Creating a personal website

As I was going through the process of creating my own website, I decided that my inaugural blog post would be about the process of creating a website, because I found that steps that the most basic steps that work do not exist in one area.  I really have no idea how the internet works, so hopefully somebody like me who started out by googling “creating a personal website using Vista” will be able to find this page, and get some detailed advice as to what worked for me.  This step by step guide will be for people who are using Windows Vista and interested in having their website hosted by a hosting service, which will obviously cost some money (currently $6.95 a month plus startup fees from lypha) but I would recommend due to ease of use, service and support, garaunteed uptime, and the ability to use it as a remote backup of stuff on your computer (even things completely unrelated to your website). I will describe my specific experience using lypha, I don’t know if other services are different.

1. Setting up your server: The first step to creating your own website is to purchase space on lypha.  I opted for the unlimited space option, but you can go cheaper. As part of this process, you will choose a domain name for your website. I just chose leoespindle.com. Lypha will take care of automatically registering the domain name for you with the authorities, but it may take several days. In the meantime, once you purchase the service, they will give you the actual IP address for your website, which is just as good as a domain name (only harder to remember). If it takes more than 72 hours to register your domain name (as it did with mine), then you can simply send an email to Lypha customer support and they’ll take care of it for you immediately manually. Lypha will then send you an account setup email with a ton of information about all the things that are included in your purchase, most of which I am still not familiar with, but look pretty cool.
2. Accessing your website: Once you recieve your email from lypha, your website is available. In the email will be a link to your website. When you go to it for the first time in a web browser, it will simply show a default page showing that it is “working”. At this point, you may be wondering, as I was, “okay, what now?”  At this point, I would recommend going to your website “control panel”, the link to which is also in your email from lypha. From the control panel, you can set up your email and an FTP account, as well as monitor disk space usage and even upload and edit files. I immediately set up an FTP account – I don’t know if you have to because I think one might already be set up (details in the lypha email), but thats what I did.
3. Setting up FTP: The hardest part for me was/is using FTP.  I had no idea what FTP program to use – the ones that the control panel all recommend cost money to download. The one I ended up using was WinSCP, which is free, simple, and worked beautifully for me right off the bat. I don’t think you have to mess around with the Vista firewall or the Norton firewall or anything. I still can’t figure out how to use SFTP, but my FTP settings were:  hostname: my IP address; port: 21; username: whatever was in your lypha email under FTP; password: whatever was in your lypha email under FTP; file protocol: FTP; encryption: no encryption. I realize this setup is not ideal, as there is no security in terms of encryption, but until I figure out how to use SFTP, this works. Once connected, the interface is pretty self-explanatory.
4. Designing your content: Now that you can connect to your website via FTP, you can upload files to your website from your computer. The default setup is that when somebody types in your domain name into the address bar in their browser, what is displayed on their screen is in the “index.html” file in your www folder. You can edit this index.html file on your own computer and then upload it to your website, but it has to be called “index.html” (there are actually many default names if you google it, but it has to be one of those listed). I am pretty worthless as far as HTML and website design goes, so I recommend finding somebody’s personal webpage that you like and then “borrowing” their code (right clicking on the page and then choosing “view source” works nicely). You should also “borrow” their css files. Browsing computer science departments at universities is fertile ground for finding functional, stylish personal websites with varying degrees of complexity.  For instance, I “borrowed” Joel Brandt‘s website.  Once you have a template, editing the HTML and CSS files are pretty self-explanatory – I find it is easier to learn when you start with a template than making something from scratch when you are just starting out.  Make sure that you put your index.html file and all your website directories and files that the website needs in your www foler.
5. Setting up WordPress: If you want to start a blog, then I would recommend setting up wordpress. CPanel supports WordPress through a nice little program called Fantastico which can be found on your control panel under software/services. The setup is self-explanatory and easy – just click on Fantastico and there are step by step instructions. While Fantastico does all the work for you, all of your blog files will also be located in your www folder on your website, so that is where you can access them for whatever reason.

I hope these five steps will help people. I basically created this website to learn how to do “web stuff”, so as I learn things I will publish them here.