Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Introduction

These days, it’s all but impossible to find someone who hasn’t heard of the Internet. Companies create websites before they make business plans. Political activists skip the debates and trash-talk their opponents online. Even formerly technophobic grandmothers spend hours emailing old friends (and selling the odd family heirloom on eBay). The Internet has even changed our language: Google and friend are now verbs, for example, and tweet has nothing to do with birds.

As you no doubt know, you can establish a web presence in many ways. You can chat with friends through a Facebook page, share pictures with like-minded photographers on Flickr, put your home videos on YouTube, or write short diary-style blurbs on a blog hosted by a service like Blogger. But if you’re ambitious enough to have picked up this book, you’re after the gold standard of the Web: a bona fide website to call your own.

So what can you accomplish with a website that you can’t do with email, social networking, and other web-based services? In a word: anything.

Is your personal website just a permanent place to stash your résumé or the hub of an e-commerce warehouse that sells personalized underpants? (Hey, it’s made more than one millionaire.) The point is that a website of your own gives you the power to decide exactly what it is—and the control to change everything on a whim. If you’re already using other web-based services, like YouTube and Facebook, you can make them a part of your website, as you’ll ...