General Information

Prepare the content for your web site. Sounds obvious, but remember, that a web site allows you to have plenty of space and information, together with images and documents. You are not limited by any size and web sites with very little information look empty. It is possible to 'fill' the web site using clever design, but what is the chance people will come back to your site, if there is not much there.

Domain Name

Probably the best way to go is to get a domain name. That is the name like aartvark.info. There are many domain extensions available like .com, .com.au ,.net, .net.au etc. By registering one for your web site, you will be located under this domain name. You can however go without your own domain name, where your site might be located under an address like this:

http://www.aartvark.info/your_site

Web Space / Hosting

The second most neccessery thing is to find a space for your site, where you web site will live. You can have it on your computer, but considering, that your site should be on the net 24/7, you would need to have to have your computer running non-stop too. Plus it takes lot of configuration for you to host your site. The alternative is that you buy a publish your site with a hosting company, where you get web space with certain specifications depending on your needs, upload the site into that space and you are then on the net. There is of course bit more to it than that, but that's the general picture.

E-mail

Once you have your space and domain, most hosting companies will offer up to 10 email addresses with your hosting package, that would be in the format like this:

your_name@your_domain.com.au

Your e-mail runs through the server of the hosting company and you of course have the chance to simply teach your e-mail software like Outlook Express to retrieve all your e-mail from the hosting server.

Maintenance

Once your site is on the net, you may need to keep it updated. There are two different ways of keeping the content fresh.

• Changing the actual page and its content and reloading the new page over the old one on the server
• Having the web site structured from the start so that you can use a database to store important information through a 'self administration page'. This way the content of the web site is easily changed and updated by you at your own computer. You can also have content added by users through their submissions to your web site. Please see dynamic pages.