Starting a website. Beginners Guide

This is the first in a series of articles on how this website is put together and will hopefully answer the questions some members have asked.
How do I get an address like northerndwarf.org?
You need to sign up to a hosting company who will sort this out for you. A hosting company is a company who is connected to the internet with high bandwidth connections, these are very fast and can provide internet pages to millions of users simultaneously. A simple analogy would be that your broadband internet connection is like a small overgrown path onto the information superhighway, their connection would be a 10 lane motorway. They have computers that hold your website, and are fully backed up and kept secure against hackers.

I picked one.com as a hosting company and have found them to be very reliable and after 20+ years in IT i have never found a company to offer the level of service they do for the price they do.

How much does it cost?

We pay 90p (Ninety Pence) per month for 1 Gb of space, and paid £6.00 to register the address northerndwarf.org. Plus we got the first year free. This is a better proposition that the free web hosting companies you will find, because it allows you to have a professional looking address, and it does not make you have other peoples adverts on your site. The ones you find on our website are put there by me and generate money for the club. We have earned about £60 since the site went live in January 2008; not a fantastic amount but it has more than covered the cost of hosting the site.

This is the current offer from One.com, which currently at time of writing means its totally free.

Coming soon. Designing your site.

I would like to hear from anyone on this subject. Is this information useful to you? What would you like to know more about? email Richard on webmaster@northerndwarf.org