[LucyB]

Morning all,

I want to build a website, that will really just be for info (for a new business). It doesn't need to be fancy, no booking or buying online or anything. I just need a web presence, I think.

What's the best way to go about this? Paying someone to do it for me, buying some software and doing it myself, or can someone recommend a free website-building download?

Also, what's the etiquette with domain names? I have registered a couple of different but linked things; the one I really wanted was only available as a .com, the .co.uk had been taken. I got the .com one, then managed to find the details of the person who had registered the .co.uk. I already know one person in the area who is doing the same thing as me, and so I avoided her permutation of the domain name - her website/ business is up and running and we are on friendly terms.

The question is, should I contact this other person who doesn't seem to have got started yet? If I am using the .com one it might get confusing if she starts using the .co.uk one as well. Potentially, we could actually share a website as we will be offering the same thing and there seems to be enough work around that we could quite easily share it, thereby sharing costs as well. Has anyone got any experience of a situation like this?

Oh, the excitement of new ventures 

[Bubba]

Lucy,

It's very easy just to get the site up and going.

If your site isn't going to be mega-busy (lots of downloads, thousands of visitors a day) or huge (loads of big files on the site) then a cheap hosting package will do the job. Often, the company that you've bought the domains from will offer such a service.

If they don't then there's loads of cheap hosting places.

All you do is point your domain at the hosting server. If you buy the package from the same people then this is usually automatic. If not, your domain will usually come with some sort of control panel where you can update the DNS tags (the things that tell t'interweb where to look for your site) to point at your host.

Once you've got that sorted, you can set up your site. There's many free HTML editors about or if you're feeling technical you can even use something like notepad. You'll probably need to learn a bit of HTML (describes the site content) and CSS (describes how that content appears) but it's not rocket science and there's lots of good online tutorials.

Regarding domain name conflict - probably best to avoid using the .com if somebody else is going to build a similar idea on the .co.uk. How long has the .co.uk been registered and who was it registered by? Often people will register a name but never use it. Go here: http://whois.domaintools.com/ ,enter the domain name and look at what's under "Registrant" and  "Registrant's address".

[dobbin]

There really are lots of useful resources for all different skill levels for writing your own HTML, so i would hold off buying any sort of website builder software until you've at least had a gander. If you can get your head round it, its better to learn how it works because all these site building tools make big unwieldy pages that are hard to debug if you need to.

If you wrote it yourself, you know what you did and hopefully why you did it!

[Bubba]

http://www.w3schools.com/ has good HTML & CSS tutorials.

[LucyB]

Cheers for that.

I have found the details of who registered the .co.uk  - it's been registered since last November. I was thinking about contacting her to see if she wanted to share a website, but wasn't sure if this was the done thing!

This all seems a bit geeky for me but I'm sure I'll get my head round it 

[philo]

this is who i am with,
amazing company

http://www.fractix.info/