How to Build Your Own Website
EXTRA CONTENT
- Intro | Step 0 | Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4 | Step 5 & Beyond | Extra Content
Hosting Alternatives
- An alternative free hosting site could be Altervista. Altervista allows for back-end handling and would be great for starting to dive into back-end web development.
- For a cost (*these all aren't really necessary for a basic site and are probably too much firepower for your needs):
- Namecheap Hosting
- GoDaddy Hosting
- Amazon Web Services
- ...many others
- A pretty nice guide comparing other hosting services outside of these few could be found here.
Domain Service Alternatives
For configuring your domain in one of these, consider seeing if any documentation existis for how to configure it in regards to your selected use-case (for example: GitHub's Documentation on managing a custom domain or on configuring a custom domain name), or simply Google and see what resources/guides might be out there.
Text Editor Alternatives
For your text editor, you could use an online IDE such as repl.it (this particular one can be used for well beyond just HTML/CSS/JS) or you can download some software and locally edit your files on your machine. I personally prefer the latter and use Atom to edit my source-code and GitHub Desktop to manage my changes and push them to the host. There a lot of ways to do this out there, you just have to do some research and figure out which option best meets your preferences.
Some Potential Options:- A fantastic option would be Adobe Dreamweaver (~$21/mo.)
- Atom (Free)
- Sublime Text (Free to an extent)
- *there are plenty of other great ones out there too - some other examples on Mac OS could be found here)
Front-End Resources
*An alternative to this entire manual process that does not require front-end coding knowledge would be to use a site like Carrd (~$9/yr. for the most basic plan or ~$19/yr. if you want to use a custom domain) or Wix (~$13/mo. for most basic plan + the ~$10/yr. price for domain name ownership, or $0/mo. (free) if want to deal with Wix branding on the site, “.wix.com” in the URL, and limited features) for hassle-free website creation and hosting. But where's the learning in that?
Coming Soon Content
Look for content coming up related to:
- Google Analytics
- Connecting forms to your site
- Connecting social share buttons
- Learning back-end (hint: you will need different host than GitHub Pages for that)
- Making your "mailto" more interesting
- *AND MORE - let me know any requests you might have