Building Your Own Website – A Step By Step Guide
I’ve been working at a jail now for over 5 years.
It’s a decent job. The people are interesting, the work is easy, the pay is good and every now and then I get to hit someone with a chair.
On the side, however, I manage a stable of 120 or 140 websites, which bring in a considerable amount of money each month. Nothing crazy, but enough so that my wife doesn’t have to worry about working while she finishes up her student teaching.
Every few days or so, someone I work with says to me, “Hey, you have a lot of web sites, and you make some extra cash with them.”
And I say, “Yes. Yes I do.”
And then they usually ask me, “Well, when you get a chance, do you think you can show me how I can set up my own website? I’d love to make a little money on the side.”
And then I say, “Sure, not a problem.”
At this point they ask me, “Well, what are your days off?”
To which I reply, “Thursday and Friday are good, except on Thursday I’m really only available from 9 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon or so. After that I’m spending time with the kids and my wife.”
They usually say, “Ok.”
And then I continue, “On Fridays I’m watching two of the kids while the third is at preschool until 11:30 in the morning, at which point I then will drive over there with all the kids in tow and pick him up and bring him back home. Then I make lunch for all three, put the baby down and shoehorn whatever website work I can while he’s asleep and the other two are playing Left4Dead. That is, if I’m not killing hordes of zombies alongside my 3-year-old and my 5-year-old.”
At that point we usually exchange numbers and I never hear from the person again, which is really too bad – because it really is very easy to build your own website. And once you have your own website, you can usually make a little money with it. And once you can make a little money with your website, you can usually duplicate the process over and over again until eventually you sit back and realize: “Hey, I’m making a lot of money with this.”
The biggest problem with building websites – at least for most of the people I talk to – is getting started with the process. Because most people aren’t comfortable with much more than Facebook or MySpace, putting together a decent website looks way more complicated than it is. Adding to the problem is that most people don’t know where to look for information on building their own website and don’t know what information is current. There’s a lot of information out there that is dated, biased, trying to sell you something or just plain wrong.
I am hoping that the guide to building websites that I’m putting together, that I’ll post here over the next few days will make the whole web page building process a little clearer and easier to follow for the people who are interested in that sort of thing.
For those of you who want a quick overview of what this guide will include, here it is:
The Guide:
Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins
Just how much is the e-book going to sell for?
Give me a quarter, I love quarters.