starting a website.

[Guren]

Are there any FREE websites that allow people to create a FREE website with all the basic stuff.

Like it has... links,downloads,FORUMS,search and all that. Like a home page with forum just like FFXIonline.com

I have made over 30 free forum boards for people but now I want to start on making websites that INCLUDE forums as ffxionline does.

please help me out

[DakAttack]

Re: starting a website.

Well, you're going to have to write your own sites, nobody is going to hand them to you unless they've branded them a million times like Angelfire or Geocities.

You'll have to pay for space to host your site as well, and most likely pay for a professionally created forum.

I'd suggest finding a class to take in web developement and graphics design to get yourself started.

[bside]

Re: starting a website.

Without knowing exactly what you wanna do w/ the new website, it's hard to tell, but I can say this much; the more you want to "cutomize" the websit, the more knowledge you must have.


One form of websites that offers all the features that you listed, except for forums, is a weblog (blog). There are many free blog services available these days, and can be easily configured. It generally takes the knowledge of how to set up the CGI script (or PHP depending on the scripts), and also some stylesheets if you wanna change the templates, but w/ the free service it's already set up for you, and you can easily change the template w/ a few clicks.

However, blog is basically intended as a diary, or as such the place to post daily, weekly, or even monthly updates regarding the topic(s) the site covers. Therefore, it's not designed as a website you're probably thinking of. Of couse, how we use it is left to each users, so many people indeed use blogs in very unique ways that fall beyond the definition of blog.


Nevertheless, it's probably better to use one of those editors, such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, if you wanna make a very cutomized website, while adding the search function is something you'd probably need to omit.

BTW, adding "downloads" means you must manually upload the files to the server and put links to them. If you don't know what this means, I strongly recommend that you start w/ learning how the internet and websites work.

[Guren]

Re: starting a website.

Went to my old games website and heres an example of what i want.

http://heavyarms.alturl.com/

it has everything i want and its free.

i just dont know the site it came from

[Thrasher]

Re: starting a website.

http://www.getphpbb.com/ and they got there url from shorturl.com

[nazlfrag]

Re: starting a website.

For general info you can head to http://www.webmasterworld.com/new_web_development/
That's the 'New to Web Development' section, there are many other sections offering help on all aspects of web development.

Regarding your situation, you should look at cheap hosting options for around $5 a month which should support a forum of around 1000 users. Most hosting packages come with tools to set up forums built in. Free hosting is very restrictive in what you can do, and you will have branding and ads from your free provider littering your site.

[Thrasher]

Re: starting a website.

http://www.alvit.de/handbook/
You might find some interesting links on this page also. Yes a large part of the articles are aimed at experienced programers and web masters, but you might find some stuff worth reading.

[PiNG]

Re: starting a website.

You are planning on sizable site, it's always good to start with some what decent 5~10$ hosting, than you can move on there to probably dedicated hosting to colocation hosting.

Believe it or not this site first started on Tripod for few month. With just few simple guide, than went to PHPwebhosting, which did pretty good for another 4 month or so. Than they started to throttle and cut my bandwidth for too much traffic (even though they allowed unmetered traffic, i was way over their expectation), and was bogging down the shared servers (you will end up with 'shared' hosting for hosts that are paid cheap, the site was running ultimate bulletin board back then) ><; the site went WAYYYY over what i planned.

Original site: http://web.archive.org/web/200209220...fxionline.com/ (Wish I can find all the original files so I can go back to it and remember the old days, LOL)

Now, i'm on a fully dedicated custom server with pretty much limitless bandwidth. To be exact, if i ever hit it... 40,000GB / month Bandwidth, mostly the reason why I let other sites take images and files hosted/attached/ftp'd on this site, and give access with no log-in required (server fees paid yearly).

You can get feel for if you will be enough with cheaper hosting, and move on when you see the sign where site's bogging down and getting pretty good traffic.

If needed and conditions are right, I can give you hosting space with subdomain only. ie: http://dak.ffxionline.com like that, I try not to give free fully hosted domain as it can get out of hand FAST.

-PiNG

[DakAttack]

Re: starting a website.

I completely forgot about that!

I suppose I could add a Paladin AF guide to it, but there's nothing there you couldn't find on KI. =/

I'm just not interesting enough by myself to warrent a page on me.