Child's Play

I’m reminded again about how much people DON’T know about this whole Interweb thing.

My wife was talking with a friend who said they spent 8 hours trying to get a web site up and running and it still wasn’t working. I was shocked. I can have a site up in 20 minutes, including registering the new domain name. Slap a little WordPress on the old web host, make a few changes to the configuration, and blammo! instant web site. Child’s play.

At least it is for me, but then I’ve been doing this since 1994.

The basics of a web site are about the domain name, the web host, and the files to create the site.

A user types in a web address into their browser (IE, FireFox, Safari) and hits go. The browser tried to find out where the web host with that domain name lives. Once it figures out which server to ask for the web page, it goes and asks that server. The server thinks about it for a minute, then returns the correct web page that is then displayed in the browser.

This means that the domain name needs to be registered. It needs to point at the right web host server. There’s some configuration that needs to happen to make that work.

Next step is that the web host needs to point that domain name at the right directory on the web server. It’s possible to have www.domain.com point at one directory and blog.domain.com point at another directory which then creates two totally separate web sites.

The files in the directory need to be written in a way that make sense. They can be in plain old HTML, which is a fancy way of writing text. They are nothing but text put into a certain formate. If don’t want to learn HTML (and why would you these days?), then you can use an out of the box content management system. I use WordPress for almost everything these days. That takes a bit of an install and there is one or two critical things that need to be set correctly, but most web hosts can set this up for you with a click of a button. Really. Click, bang, done.

There seems to be a few critical steps along the way to getting a web site up and running. Easy for me, hard for you. I once heard that brain surgery is easy if you know how to do it.

If you are having trouble trying to get a web site up and running, but are just having that one bit of trouble where something is just not working right, send me an email. I’ll totally help you out. I hate to see someone struggle with something that I can quickly and easily fix. I won’t design and develop a new WordPress theme for you for free, but I’ll be happy to help you through the little problems along the way to getting your site up and running.