Total newbie at making a website, tips?

[steven]

I sorta want to open my own site. The problem is, I'm totally inept at it. I want to transfer my SFC impressions onto a proper site, so I can have individual links to take you straight to the game, rather than waiting for 100's of pictures to load at a time.

I've looked at Brinkster.com, godaddy.com, and a few others. I have NO clue how to begin. I understand getting the domain name part for 5.99 as offered by godaddy, but how does one build a site? There's that HTML stuff, and <> scripts right? You can't just write like I'm writing right now, and then copy and paste it into a website and hit submit, correct?

I'd love to perserve my work and have it presented more neatly in a compact site all my own, but I'm not lying when I say I am a total noob at this website stuff.

I also wish not to install a program. I know one friend uses WordPress. Another FrontPage. I have no idea what these are.

I guess my main questions are, besides tips in general, or maybe even a How-To guide or "For Dummies" summary if anyone would be so gracious

-anyone use godaddy or brinkster? pro's and con's of whatever site you use?

-can I just build my site from an Internet Explorer ("IE") site, so I don't have to install anything?

Yeah...

I mean, I almost bought a godaddy package, but it would have cost me like $70 something, and I got cold feet as I wasn't even sure if I could use it properly; didn't want to waste $70.

I've been asked so many times if I'll ever transfer my SFC work to a website... yeah I'd love to, problem is, I have no idea how!

Any help is appreciated.

[HMD]

WILL HELP YOU!

Domains/hosting plans- The $5.99 offer from GoDaddy was simply for the name. So say, if you wanted to call your site www.killingyourfacewithawesome.net, you would give GoDaddy (or whoever you end up going with) $5.99 for the use of that name.

Hosting plans, on the other hand, are where you get a much larger server than the free sites (Geocities, Tripod and so forth), in addition to being able to create a number of domain names and sub-domains (Dreamhost, the host I use, allows for me to make/buy unlimited names). This means you get more disk space and bandwith to use.

Now I know you gave the thumbs down to a CMS (Content Management System), but most of these things are amazingly user-friendly, and will help you quite a bit if you're going to make a large review site. Wordpress is probably the most easy-to-use and versatile of them all; think of a Livejournal interface but better. It allows you to write just like how you're writing now, then hit submit and then whoa, new page.

As I said earlier, I use Dreamhost, so my experience with Brinkster and GoDaddy is nil.

If you wanted to build something from scratch, you'd have to use Notepad and a decent understanding of HTML. This is an amazingly difficult and time-consuming process, doubly so for a site like yours, which requires lots of pages.

That's pretty much it as far as basics go. If you want, I could get into much more advanced stuff, like FTP programs, hexidecimal codes and the like (protip: this stuff isn't nearly as complicated as I make it sound).

[Weasel]

If you'd rather not use a CMS and would rather just stick with a traditional HTML site (providing you have the patience for such things), but don't want to code a whole thing from scratch, try www.oswd.org - Open Source Web Design. Free website templates to use wherever. My site, armory.drdteam.org, uses a design from there.