How to create a personal website or build a church website

How to create a personal website is easy when you don't want to make money. The same applies to other non-profit ventures such as church website design, or designing a website for your club.

Here are some big freedoms that you don't have for designing a money-making site.

You can use a free host such as your ISP, or Tripod, if you need more room than your ISP gives you. It doesn't matter if search engines ignore free sites, because you will tell your friends or club members by word of mouth.

You don't need to buy a domain to give you respectability.

It doesn't matter if a photograph takes 45 seconds to load, because you will have warned everyone about the slow load. In a commercial site, everyone hits the back button in ten seconds or less.

If you know how, you can put in videos, or have a recording of yourself singing in the background, and your friends might not hit the back button.

Your site needn't be inferior, just because it's non-profit

There are two kinds of amateur - motivated and unmotivated. If your committee volunteered you to create a website, because you weren't there at the time and nobody else wanted the job, you will probably be unmotivated! All you need will be covered in this page.

An amateur motivated by personal challenge will often do a better job than a professional motivated by a hunger for money. If you want your site to excel, then study the rest of this site, especially the
html tutorials.

I was among three volunteer bus drivers who turned up to take some senior citizens on a bus outing. Only 18 people turned up for the outing, including the organizers, and we had room for 80. The club newsletter probably had a boring paragraph about coming events that mentioned the outing. Think how much better a web page with photographs taken along the route and a call to action (Book your free trip now!) would have been.

Let's face it - most club newsletters are too boring to read. But if you are motivated you can build a free Christian web site for instance, that will have members talking and laughing about your comments, and eagerly looking forward to forthcoming events.

The easiest way to design a web page

I strongly suggest that you should get the package to make own website from SBI. It will cost you less than $300 per year, and when your volunteer goes on holiday, it only takes a few minutes to show the next volunteer how to put in more web pages.

You don't need to know anything about HTML codes or any of the other technical stuff. You just put your articles and pictures in, using the system that was designed for people like you.

OK. Here is an easy way to create a website.

It does need some knowledge and you need to download and install FTP software. It assumes that you have MS Word installed, and that you know how to use it.

Make a directory on your computer that will be used only for the website. You could put it in My Documents and call it MyWebsite. Create a template in Word from a document in MyWebsite folder. If you don't know how, see my video in the members section..

Create your first web page (using the template, in your MyWebsite directory) which will have links to all your other web pages, with photographs, and an article, or description, and anything else that takes your fancy, as a Word document. When it looks how you want it, use File > Save As > html to save it as "index.html" and view it in your browser while still on your computer.

Word (or FrontPage) will have converted your page into the HTML equivalent, so that you can put it on a website, or view it on your computer. I would be ashamed to create such bad HTML code, but what can you expect from a stupid computer? At least it usually works. Word will also have created a directory with special files such as picture file in it. You will have to transfer them using FTP.

To create links, type the text such as "How To Be Happy" then highlight it. Click insert > Hyperlink, and the text to display will appear in the top panel and there will be another field below for you to fill in the URL of your linked page. So if your destination page is called how-to-be-happy.html you type that in. This is known as relative addressing.

Relative addressing is like you use for local letters. You don't bother putting the country, because it is just local. You could of course use absolute addressing, but that would stop working when you moved it from your computer to your host. You would have to change it to something like
http://internetserviceprovider.com/~yourname/how-to-be-happy.html to make it work.

Fine now you've got everything ready to build a church website, or other simple site. Ask your ISP about creating your own website, and how to transfer your pages to the site they give you. Then you can transfer your files and tell all your friends where to find your pages.

Your ISP doesn't usually like you to have commercial sites for free, but they are usually happy to show you how to create a personal website or other non-profit website.

Your URL will be something horribly long like
http://internetserviceprovider.com/~yourname/ but once your friends have bookmarked it, they won't mind how long it is. A domain name looks more professional, but you don't need professional in a personal website.

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How to create a personal website or build a church website