Creating a Website

There are several ways to create a website.

Let’s take a look at the different ways to do this.

I. First and easiest, is to use a website-building company, like www.wix.com, www.weebly.com, www.webs.com, or www.wordpress.com, or several others. Some of these are more intuitive and easy to use, others require a bit of practice or education. In most cases you can build a simple website for free. The more features you want on your site, or the more memory/storage you need, the more likely you will need to “upgrade” and get a paid plan.
Wordpress continues to be the most popular option:

This article explains the differences between various website builders: https://websitebuilders.com/

II. Second, and more involved but offering far more tools and features — is to combine a sophisticated website building set with a web hosting service, for instance to combine use of www.wordpress.org (different than http://www.wordpress.com) and a web hosting provider like www.bluehost.com or www.inmotionhosting.com , or others recommended as top hosting providers. This will allow you a lot more creative and functional options for your website, such as use of the Gutenberg editing options, WordPress plug-ins, and many more templates and styles with which to create a beautiful site.

III. Are you a very independent-minded, freedom-oriented person? Would you like the maximum about of freedom to express yourself and speak? As many have become aware, there is an increasing amount of censorship going on, online. This has effected not only social media, with people being “de-platformed” from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, but website building companies have also shut down entire websites, not necessarily over illegal content, but in some cases based on political views. For instance, a feminist website was shut down by WordPress, as reported here:
https://adland.tv/adnews/wordpress-shuts-down-several-feminist-blogs-without-warning and apparently changed their rules retroactively to try to protect themselves legally. As shown by these archived views of their rules pages on Nov 16 2018 compared to Nov 21 2018:
https://archive.fo/fwcA7#selection-255.0-255.72

https://archive.fo/hS4J2#selection-185.0-185.96

So here we can clearly see that a particular political worldview is now being enforced as part of wordpress rules for all website content. More info here: https://4thwavenow.com/2018/11/27/breaking-wordpress-furtively-sanitizes-gendertrender-statement-without-informing-4thwavenow/

If you value free speech, then even if your own website content is not controversial or political in nature, you might want to consider supporting web hosting providers who are committed to free speech online. This is a list of such recommended providers, albeit from 12 years ago: https://whdb.com/blog/2007/free-speech-hosting-11-web-hosts-that-wont-dump-you-at-the-first-sign-of-controversy/
Another article is here, listing 8 top free speech oriented web hosting services:
https://hexd.com/free-speech-hosting/

One of the web hosting providers that I found which seems most committed to free speech is a newer business, www.zensurfrei.com. They are more expensive than the others but their free speech commitment seems very strong, with some members of their company having experienced the oppressive effect of censorship.

But finding a censorship-free web hosting service is only half of the task, since web hosting services just provide the space for your website, not the template or structure for creating the website itself.

If you don’t want to rely on WordPress.com or WordPress.org, another way to do would be to pay a website developer to build and code your website, or learn to code a simple website yourself.

While creating a complex website like those provided by WordPress.com or WordPress.org involves complex coding, using Javascript or PHP, designing a simple website may only involve HTML and CSS code, and tutorials available to help you do this. For instance, here’s a site that teaches you about how to build your own website: https://www.quackit.com/make-your-own-website/ and here’s a page with many HTML code packages you can use for your site creation: https://www.quackit.com/html/codes/

There are also other websites oriented to helping learn HTML and CSS code: https://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

If you are a complete beginner and know next to nothing about computer coding, you will want to start by learning HTML and CSS. HTML is the “building blocks” or structural elements of how to create your site, such as organizing it by creating a header, a body, and footer section, organizing it into paragraphs, putting in lists, tables, forms, buttons or links. CSS is what you use to “style” a website, to organize sections on the page, to give it different colors, fonts, shapes.

I recommend this 4.75 hour video tutorial on very basic HTML and CSS. The narrator is a little silly but that adds to the lowbrow, lowtech appeal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUv_n3T7n0

Or, if you prefer listening to a more sophisticated gentleman with a French accent, this 1.5 hour video tutorial also covers some very basic elements of HTML and CSS and is oriented to the beginner, though it is a little more demanding in terms of ability to grasp concepts:

After watching one of those or both, which basically describes how to create different structural parts of a website and some basics on how to style them, I recommend this 2 hour video tutorial which shows you how to create a sample website using HTML and CSS:

Here are a couple other video tutorials that demonstrate how to create a sample website with HTML and CSS:

One hour video on creating a website with HTML5

This one is a 15 minute video tutorial showing how to create a simple website:

And on that same YouTube channel, a 2 hour video tutorial showing how to create a somewhat more complex website using HTML and CSS and Bootstrap:

Once you learn HTML and CSS, if you want to give your website some functionality or interactivity, you may want to learn Javascript, which is considered to be the most popular and most versatile of computer programming languages. This video gives a one hour tutorial on basic Javascript:

And:

IV. If you like the idea of doing everything for free, ….once you code your own website, you can actually get it hosted online for free using Github at https://github.com/ or Netlify at https://www.netlify.com/, though these work for “static sites” only.

Whatever means you use to set up your website, I recommend that you always keep copies of your content on a separate storage device, such as your hard drive, external hard drive, thumb drive and/or discs.

V. Finally….it’s actually possible for you to do be your own “web hosting provider”…it is possible to change your PC (or, a second PC you have that you dont’ use very often) into a web server. These 2 videos show how that is done:

A 4 minute tutorial on turning your computer into a web server: