CSA Online by Andrew Moore-Crispin A website to call your own A website is your own little flag planted online. Creating one is easier than you might think. It used to be that you needed to know at least a little HTML (the basic behind-the-scenes “language” of the internet) to create a site. Not anymore. There are ways to create a simple site for free. For more complex sites − if you want to sell products or accept payments for example − there are plenty of options that will let you do that, but there’s a cost involved. Why build a website? Maybe you want to create a personal portfolio or a blog to share thoughts or poetry or scrapbooking creations. Maybe you want a way to keep your team or club or congregation or HOA or whatever up to date on the latest happenings. Maybe you’ve got a new business idea that you want to share with the world. There’s no one reason to create a website. There are some 200 million active websites online today. Yours can be whatever you want. Get a domain name You don’t necessarily need a domain name (e.g., yourdomain.com) to have your own website. However, if you want something a bit more memorable, professional and personal, it helps. A domain name is your website’s address online. It ends with a “top level domain” or TLD. ATLD is basically what comes after the last dot in a web address. You’re probablymost familiar with .com. Fun fact: There are no .com domain names with fewer than four letters remaining to register. That is to say, every possible combination of four letters, literally from aaaa.com to zzzz.com, is spoken for. Given that shorter is better in domain names, it’s a good thing that .com is far from the only option. You’re probably already familiar with .net and .org. There’s also .co, .biz, .io, .tv. There are country-code TLDs (.ca, .us, .co.uk). There are also hundreds of “generic top level domains” (gTLDs) to choose from. gTLDs are relatively new. They’re neat because they can say a lot about your site. There’s .club, .portfolio, .media, .pro, .ink, .horse and so many more options. For a full list, check out wikipedia.org/wiki/gtld. Register a domain name There are many choices when it comes to selecting a domain name. Godaddy. com, hover.com, namecheap.com and many more. Each offers a search that lets you enter your preferred domain name and checks to see if it’s available. If so, you can proceed to register it. If not, you’ll see some other options and variations to consider.The cost will vary but, barring specials and promotions, the initial cost to register is between $15 and $35 per year for most TLDs. Some TLDs cost more and some less. “Premium” domains − that is, highly sought-after names that someone has already registered to arbitrage − can cost thousands, tens of thousands and, in some cases, much, much more. But that’s a topic for another discussion. What to do with a domain name Your domain name can point at anything you like: an online calendar, a social media profile or a link aggregator such linktree. Staying on topic, though, we’re going to point our domain to our new website. So, let’s create one. Creating a website can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be.There are services that let you click, drag and drop to build a professional-looking site with little or no coding experience required. website template 50 | www.snowbirds.org
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