Website stuves
I do run my own website. Although there is nothing but a blog basically on there now because i'm in the middle of a redesign
I'll try to give you as much information as possible that I can think of off the top of my head
Anyways, some good software to have would be(of course, some of this stuff costs alot of money, but they offer trial versions of just about all I do believe. A few I wouldn't recommend unless you can get student discounts or sleep at night on piles of money):
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3D Studio Max 5: Most well-rounded 3D rendering software. Used by sites like
Shadowness. More expensive than a *good* used car and a learning curve so steep, it's actually a wall.
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Adobe Photoshop 7.0: The industry standard software for editing images and creating graphics and it also includes ImageReady which is great for creating webpages. Just draw your page out and use the slices. It'll do all the HTML for you. Expensive but the best there is. Rather steep learning curve.
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JASC Paint Shop Pro 7: Image editing software like Photoshop 7. Actually quite powerful and easier to use than Photoshop for an incredible amount less money(but not as powerful as Photoshop). Under $100 last I checked. Moderate learning curve.
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Macromedia Flash MX: Great for dynamic web graphics. Check out
2Advanced for an example of what Flash can do.
Very steep learning curve and quite expensive.
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Macromedia Dreamweaver MX: Best damn WYSIWYG web-editing and creation software out there. I don't care what anyone says, a good 70-80% of web designers out there use this. Moderate learning curve and rather expensive.
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Macromedia Fireworks MX: Good image-editing software. Not nearly as powerful as Photoshop 7.0, but it integrates nicely with Dreamweaver and Flash. Somewhat steep learning curve and somewhat expensive
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Macromedia Studio MX: It's Flash MX, Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX all in one package. Very expensive.
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Microsoft Frontpage: A WYSIWYG web-design program like Dreamweaver, but less powerful and alot less money. Usually included with various versions of Microsoft Office. Moderate learning curve.
As for hosting, well, you have alot of choices. Some ISP's include free webspace(mine does) and some don't. Then you can get some free webspace. Places like
Geocities or
Lycos will give you a small amount of webspace for free. However, they don't allow external linking(so you couldn't store your avatar there and link to it), and have ads and bandwidth limits, so if you need alot of space and decent bandwidth or a place to store images, then they're no good.
You can host a site off your own computer, but unless you know what you're doing, I wouldn't recommend it. In my opinion, it's a security risk. As well it will be operating on your internet connection. If it is slow, your site will be too, and you could eat up your bandwidth.
Then there's paid hosting. This is the best way. Your site is stored in a server, usually on a really fast internet connection and you use FTP to connect to it to upload files. Downtime is usually minimal too, because these companies usually have backup power generators and such. Price depends on their connection, security, stability and the size and bandwidth limit of the "hosting package" you bought. I'd say prices can range from 2 bucks a month to thousands of dollars a month.
Personally I have 75MB of space and 1.5GB a month. It's not much, but it's enough for what I use it for which is pretty much just a personal site. I pay 4 dollars a month.
Now your site's address will be something like "
http://hostingcompany.com/27152hs782". You'll want to register a
domain name. This will be something like
www.mysitepwnz.com or whatever you choose. Most hosts can usually register the domain name for you. Domains usually cost around 10 bucks a year. Basically you're buying that name.
The reason i'd recommend a paid host is because unlike Geocities or Lycos, they will(not always, find out before you buy) allow Cgi, Perl, PHP and give you a MySQL database.
That kind of stuff will allow you to use pre-made scripts and such. You can do that kinda stuff with just straight HTML, but PHP makes it ALOT easier, usually just upload the files and type in the url for the install file. I have a .php newsscript, so all I do is just type the url, and I get a login screen to type news updates. It's almost exactly like posting here
Anyways, sorry about the length, I just remember how many questions and how lost I was when I first got into web design, so I kinda wanted to try and help as much as possible.
If you need any more info or have any questions, feel free to pm me and i'll try to help as best I can.
I don't think they'd allow links to some webspace hosts, but if you want any, I can give you some as well.
