Getting Started with Personal WebSite

You have decided to start your personal website, where you want to express yourself, share photos and videos with family members, put up your resume, work related experiences, post daily blog thoughts and personalise it with your taste of colors and layout. Now what? Most people stumble here, not knowing exactly where to start and the lores of detail available on the internet can be quite intimidating. Here is an easy step by step guide to get started:

1. Buy your domain name

Check if the domain name you want is available and just buy here

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/ has domains available from $9.95 a month.

2. Buy a hosting package

Now that you have a domain name, you need to host a web server where you can put up web pages and photos and even install database software. www.godaddy.com has some good hosting packages for relatively cheap fees.

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp?ci=9009

You can find Windows hosting packages with 100GB space, 1000GB monthly data transfer and 1000 Email accounts for only $4.89 a month with 3 year contract.

3. Now the most difficult step, to write ASP/HTML code with SQL procedures to get your site running.  Instead of doing these by yourself from scratch, you can use the ASP.NET personal web site starter kit

http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/personal/

Just download it, and customize it (If you know even basics of ASP.net or html, it will be very easy)

The kit also includes step by step instructions of how you can customize the default website.

You can try how your site might look like here

http://starterkits.asp.net/PersonalWebsite/

4. Deploy your website onto the hosting server you purchased a package with in step 2. The deployment instructions will be avaialable from the hosting vendor.