Eagle 95 said:Written by Eagle.
For questions regarding this tutorial send me a PMhttp://www.hackforums.net/private.php?action=send&uid=129349http://www.hackforums.net/private.php?action=send&uid=129349.Website Building Guide - From Zero to Hero!
Introducion
Everyone wants to have successful site without working on it. You can forget about that right now, there's no such thing. All of us started somewhere. As a newbie in website developing I recommend you to learn HTML and PHP for start. At least learn their basic codes and functions and later if needed upgrade your knowledge. Here are few questions which I want you answer:
I guess now, with your motivation and devotion we can start. :yeye:
- How badly you want to have good site?
- Are you willing to do basically anything to get it working?
- Do you think money is important when starting website?
Gets things you need!
It's your choice what tools you need to make your first website. I'll show you everything I know in order to get it. At its start, you need to decide what type of website you want to make, either its gonna be blog, forums, sales website or miscellaneous website type. You can't go anywhere without proper domain (What is domain?) and hosting (What is hosting?). Getting a good domain is very important. It helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and others to find your site. Having domain related to your content will help search engines to find it easier and it imporves your site Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO. You can get free or paid domain. I'd recommend a paid also known as TLD (Top Level Domain). Here are few good sites from you can get TL
or usually when you're buying hosting you have option to buy a TLD, too. Sometimes its for free and sometimes you pay few bucks. If you still want to have free domain then you can visit Co.Cc and get one. Now our next part is hosting. Getting a good host is 2nd important thing. Your site needs to be visible on internet and hosting does that. Hosting which I strongly recommend is HostGator. Here are their list of features for shared hosting:
- Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth
- Flexible, Easy to Use Control Panel
- Unlimited Sub Domains, FTP Accounts, and Email Accounts
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- No Contract with a 45 Day Money Back Guarantee
- Safe Harbor Certified (Details)
And many more which you can see on clicking to compare all hosting plans. If you want to use free hosting (which I don't recommend from many reasons):
- FreeHosting
- 000WebHost
- FreeHostia
- ByeHost
- x10Hosting
- 110mb - Only for very small blogs/sites because disk space is only 110mb.
You can find more of them from Google. Now we have domain and hosting ready for our site. Next thing we need to what you want to use on our site.
Basic Site
If you're going to create site from scratch use Kompozer as your tool. It's very good for starters with enough options. That is only to create a basic site but wait, we can make your site even better with few bucks extra bucks. For achieving that, lets head to DreamTemplates.com. Choose template you want to use and pay for it. After you paid, you have unlimited access to templates in certain period which you paid (1/2/3 years or lifetime). To edit template how you want, you need DreamWeaver which you can pay for or download from torrents for free. When you're done, just upload to your ftp with FileZilla (recommended, instead of using cP uploader). You can get sites from free from WordPress or Drupal.That was the story for basic site.
Blogs
These are easiest type of site to manage and handle. For making one, you don't need hosting and you can choose subdomain when you're making blog but it is recommended to use TLD. You can get your free blog from Blogger or from Wordpress.
Forums
Forums are great for a website which has/need discussion in it or it can just be forum-website. This is handy for support websites of products and other things which need support. There are many forum software's which you can use but here are 5 which are best of the best:
The best forum software ever made is MyBB because of many features. On 2nd place I'd say IPB. 3rd places goes to SMF. 4th place is vB because of being boring. 5th place is Phpbb. Those are my recommendations and I'm telling you this from my personal experience. I worked with many of them and I lined them up by their ease of use for newcomers. How to setup a forum, you ask me now? Well that's very easy and everybody can do it. Get FileZilla, connect to your hosting by taking server name (usually ftp.mydomain.com or some name server), login details (username/password), port is always 21. Now you're logged in your hosting ftp (What is FTP?) and you can upload your forum to your public_html or create new directory named forums or however you like. Please notice that when you create new direcotry and upload your forum files to it, location of your forum is then mydomain.com/forums or however you named that folder. That's useful for sites which has other content and forums are used for chatting or whatever. Every forum is easy to install. When uploading of all forum files is finished go to your domain and you'll see installation window. Just click next and next until you get to part which asks you to rename your file permissions. See the files which needs to be renamed in installation. After that, go to FileZilla and click on file/folder and write 777 or tick all boxes. Refresh page when you're done with all of them and proceed to next step. Next step is to connect it to your hosting and MySQL database (What is MySQL Database?). Your mysql host is usually localhost unless your hosting specifies different. Go to your cPanel and make new database and new user. Copy/paste info to boxes in installation and let it create tables and install forum software. After its finished, you'll be asked to make administrator account, which is head admin of the forum. When you made it, go to your domain and login to your new forum. :yeye:
Custom Sites
These sites require coding or modifications. They can be about anything and they can include everything every type of site shown above or something totally custom. For those you must know HTML and PHP. Good place to learn web developing languages is W3Schools. If you're lazy to do this, then pay someone to make it for you.
Okay, we done that "technical" part of making your site #1. If you're tired so far, this is only beginning and easiest part of your way. Pay attention what is next.
Advertising!
This is the biggest, hardest, time consuming part which most of webmasters fail to complete. Getting your site known to people is most difficult part. Here is the thing you need to complete, that's of course, SEO.
Content
This is very important. When you're making site, you must know content of it. Making site about something which you don't have a clue won't get you far. When having a site, try to make as much content as you can so site has more content which can be SEO-ed.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Ah this one is hard for me, too. If you don't know what is SEO see this. So the thing is you need to make your site SEO-ed good enough to appear high on google. What are the methods? Well, your best resource for that is Wikipedia. If you don't like/avoid to read much, you will fail at this point which is most important. First you need to know what are SEO methods and then to find out how to work on them. Look, understand and implement these:
- Getting indexed
- Cross Linking
- PageRank
- Link Farming
- Comment Spamming
- Keyword stiffing
- URL Normalization
- Meta Tags
- BackLinks
- SEO Trending
There are more, but those are enough. Good thing is when doing SEO purchasing SEO tools. They can be expensive but they are great things if you know how to use them. Again I'm saying, inform yourself good about SEO methods or you won't know how to use SEO tools. You can search on Google for SEO tools.
Using another sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will help you advertise your site and give few backlinks.
For Facebook: Make fan page/group and get people to join it somehow. Use something interesting to attract people. After that advertise your site in your fan page/group.
For YouTube: Make a video about your site and what you offer. YouTube videos boosting will get you extra traffic and your videos will be popular and have enough numbers of views.
For Twitter: Add many people to follow you and after that, announce your site. It won't help much but it's better than nothing.
Once you get your site popular enough, you're in good way. You're on good way becoming number 1. Keep in mind that making good site won't come over the night. It takes months, even years to make it great place to be.
Getting back invested money
If you invested in your website that's great. If not, that's ok, too. Now I'm going to show you how to get your money back and gain more of it when your site is popular (At least 200 unique visitors per day, that's minimum and it's good rate for now). The thing is to put ads from Google or some partners. If you have forums, you can charge for paid sticky or something like that. There are no limits with possibilities, try new things. If you have good content site, you can make CPA gateways on it. Same goes for blog. You can use no matter what money making method if your site has traffic and good content. I'll give one example. Lets say you have video downloading site. People who want to download videos from YouTube or somewhere else are going to come to your site. To be able to download video, they need to fill survey or something like that. Having in mind that guy/gal who wants to have that video badly is going to do anything to get it which means profit for you.
Also, there are other ways. Since now, you should be experienced webmaster. You are good with SEO and know to program 2 languages. Guess what? That can make you money, too. You can sell your services and do SEO for people or code for them. If you're good with graphic, you can learn CSS and design custom themes for forums, blogs and others which is very big profit if they are made professionally. Remember that practice makes perfect.
Website security
As some people be jealous of your success, they will try to hijack your website or its content. To prevent all of that, you need to protect your content with copyright law. Copyright is a set of rights which belong to author or creator of some work. By work, it can be almost anything. With those rights he can copy, distribute and adapt the work. There are exceptions like fair use (What is Fair Use?) doesn't require permissions to be given from author/creator. All other uses must be approved by its original author. Now we're going to move on how to protect the website itself.
Firewall on web servers
Using a firewall is very good option. It will prevent almost anything to get to your site. What online firewall do is same as firewall on your home pc, blocks inputs which can harm you computer. In this case it's your website. They can stop Ddos attacks (What is Ddos attack?) or if you use paid hosting like Hostgator (which I again strongly recommend) you have ddos protected site and I think you get some firewall and other features to deny IP's and members from your site. If you're purchasing a firewall, that can be very expensive but if your site is poplar, large and takes attacks everyday, you should have it.
Enforce strong security policy
This is mostly for forums. In ACP you can put as a must to have strong password. Also you should make a privacy policy which will help your members understand, what information you collect from and how it's going to be used. Here you can read more about internet privacy if you're a member of website which collects your personal information.
Apply patches and software updates
This is very important step. Updating your forum/blog software will help in security of your website. Here's how: when software is updating it's usually new features add and extra security measures. Old version had either small bugs or vulnerability was found in it so it's very important to update your website software. Run check once a week and don't run on old version(s).
Backuping
This is very important, too. Always backup (What is backup?) your site if you're installing something new, like updating software of website. In case something goes wrong, you won't be able to fix it. Backups are done via phpMyadmin (What is phpMyadmin?) and/or downloading your files from ftp. Backups should be done after 2 weeks or a month, in case you get hacked or hosting dies, etc.
Limiting resources on your website
Limiting what people (guests) can see on your website will help against leeching your content over the internet (this is violating of copyright law if person didn't ask you for permissions if he/she can take that content or doesn't give credits to original creator/author). There are many ways to do this. Lets say you have forums with PHP scripts which are finished and totally working. You can limit that guests can't see threads, boards or they need certain amount of posts to enter it. If you have blog or something like that, you can put CPA widget in order to download it. For picture sharing sites, you can disable right click (may not help much) or add site credits on all pictures. I'm leaving you many more possibilities to work on.
Ddos attack
To prevent this, you should use paid ddos (What is Ddos attack?) protected hosting. In that way your site will remain up even if some Ip is flooding its bandwidth. If you have a firewall, you can block certain countires, vpns, ip's to access your site and that will stop ddos attack in its tracks. Having this with a free host will only get you big trouble because you're loosing traffic (if it has 200 visitors per day) and potentially money.
Conclusion
As a reminder to you, nothing will grow up in one day, for everything it takes time (What is time?). Don't be crushed if you don't succeed first time. With time you will get better and have more experience. Don't be afraid to ask question on support websites. Everyone started from zero's and some of them became hero's. Use Google and YouTube as your best resources before asking for support on support websites. Remember, lots of sites developed SEO and they are easy to find on Google, do same with yours. Be careful who you give permissions and make sure they earn that (this isn't for support, it's for mods/staff/admins on your site/forum). I hope this will be helpful to newcomers in web developing business. Remember to update yourself constantly with new knowledge, tips and tricks, use your brain (What is brain?).
If you would like to help me in some way because I wrote this guide, then please register on TechBoost.org and remain active member. We are still in new faze but we're running good for now.
Thanks for taking time to read and understand this.
Regards,
Eagle 95
Disclaimer: I'm not responsible with any use of this information as illegal or abusive forms. This is for educational purposes only. You do not have permissions to copy/paste/rip/leech this anywhere without my permission. Disobeying this rule will result in a ban.
(c) Eagle 95 from HackForums.net - 2011
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