Once you’re ready to start a website, you need to get a domain name so people can get to it.
To get a domain you have to buy one from a domain registrar and pay a yearly fee to keep it. GoDaddy is a registrar you might know since they’ve got super bowl commercials with scantily clad babes. How distasteful! Who would ever do that! But Godaddy sucks, just in general and because they don’t really believe in the internet since they backed SOPA which would have killed Net Neutrality. So fuck them. We recommend namecheap, but there are a bunch of other good ones out there, we’ll list them below. Just fill out the name you are looking for and pick a top level domain, stuff like .com, .org, .net, .xxx.
Ok, you’ve got a domain name, now you need a server to put your files on and then tell your domain name where to look for it. A ton of companies sell server space, usually referred to as hosting. The big question is whether you want shared hosting or your own server. If you are just starting out and only want a small site, then shared hosting is fine. It’s cheaper and has everything set up for you.
If you want to be a badass and take a stab at running a server you can get a VPS, or virtual private server. It’s your own server where you can tweak and tinker with different stacks and load whatever craziness you want onto it, you’re also shit out of luck if you take your site down. So hold off until you’re more experienced. We’ll put some good shared and VPS hosts below.
Great, you say. But what code do I push. If you want to get the hang of CSS and HTML you can just do a static site with only HTML, CSS and maybe a little javascript. Here’s a super basic site we have in our local web directory. You can see the html and then the directories for CSS and Javascript that it references to make the HTML pages look sexy. Now we open cyberduck and enter the credentials you’ll get from you hosting service. Stuff like your domain name, your username and a password. Also, try and use SFTP when you can, it’s much more secure.
When the FTP program connects to the server you can just drag your files into the correct directory, then if you have everything else set up correctly you’ll have a real live website.
After you get the hang of HTML and CSS you can start learning a programming language like PHP, Ruby or Python and take it to the next level. Or dive into a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal. There’s also version control programs like Git that will track your code changes and allow your to 'push' code from your computer up to your web server. That’s something you should start looking into as soon as possible. It lets you undo stuff when you fuck up. Wouldn’t that be nice in real life?
Or you could just fuck it all and start a tumblr, up to you. But how about you set the goal higher and start the NEXT tumblr. Maybe you’ll even get a movie about you with Justin Timberlake in it.
Now you have a pretty good idea of how the internet and web development works. We wanted to give you some direction on what you need to learn. Now you can dive into some more codebabes lessons, like that’s hard.
Questions or Comments?