My first website

joehalford01

I bought a domain this weekend as I'm getting some business cards printed up. I'm not starting an actual company, these cards will contain my personal information and the A+ logo. I purchased the domain so I could have a professional email account. I plan to give them to people to cultivate some side work and more experience. I also decided it might be worthwhile to start a blog on the site, it's called http://www.networkphile.com ; I don't have a whole lot right now. My plan is to do simple articles on purchasing or building computers, fixing simple issues, things like that. This way people I give my card to can check the site out and feel confident that I'm knowledgeable. What do you guys think? Any suggestions or experience with this?

jmreicha

If you go the blog route you may consider setting up a wordpress site. Super easy to get up and running and they look really professional after a little bit of tweaking and would give you a good place to build your own personal documentation. Another route to go down depending on how interested you are on the development side would be to build a Drupal site, or even more hardcore, to pick a web framework and write your own blog from scratch.

DevilWAH

jmreicha wrote: »

If you go the blog route you may consider setting up a wordpress site.

I agree, wordpress a good starting point, it is very easy to customise and threre are thousands of plug ins to use if you dont want to get to deep in to the codigin side of things.

If you are going the blogging route, start with your current trainging and progress and build on that, I really should keep mine more updated, but if nothing else it shows what I have been gettign up to over the year.

joehalford01

Thanks, I was thinking about trying a word-press site when I have a little more time to configure it the way I want. I might expand it someday but for now, it's a simple blog. I don't want to start a business at this point so I don't want to take it to far. I like your site Devilwah, word-press might be the way to go.

N2IT

Joe keep at it you will start to design some really nice pages soon enough.

jmreicha

joehalford01 wrote: »

Thanks, I was thinking about trying a word-press site when I have a little more time to configure it the way I want. I might expand it someday but for now, it's a simple blog. I don't want to start a business at this point so I don't want to take it to far. I like your site Devilwah, word-press might be the way to go.

Its all about the learning experience, right? If you don't build the website then you won't gain those skills and it is always a good thing to take the initiative to start your own projects.

DevilWAH

I started by playing around with HTML in notepad, didnt get a very nice site, but taught me the concepts of website building. Then I jumped to things like wordpress that did most fo the work for me. Really becasue I am more a hardware engineer and for me building the webserver for a bare metal box and geting a webserver (apache) running was my main aim. Enjoy the bolging and havign a site part but have no real desire to be a web designer.

however if you are looking to become a web designer then do start at the bottom with basic HTML in notepad and build up, you will learn lots more working from the bottom up than the top down and at a much faster rate.

Xcluziv

N2IT wrote: »

Joe keep at it you will start to design some really nice pages soon enough.

I agree. Designing takes time and practice. Doesn't come overnight...trust.

joehalford01

No, I don't want to be a web designer, I wouldn't mind setting up my own web-server as that would be worthwhile but for right now I'm more interested in learning about system admin. The only reason I don't is that my girlfriend would stab me for bringing more equipment home, especially if I had to leave it running all the time for a web-server .

DevilWAH

joehalford01 wrote: »

No, I don't want to be a web designer, I wouldn't mind setting up my own web-server as that would be worthwhile but for right now I'm more interested in learning about system admin. The only reason I don't is that my girlfriend would stab me for bringing more equipment home, especially if I had to leave it running all the time for a web-server .

If you'r not to instreated in web desigen then I would jump stright in to the pre built packages, espicaly if you want to run a blog, a basic blog is easy to create your self but as soon as you want the extra features to look more profisional and incress the user experince you need to get coding and have active content, this becomes a huge project that will take years to learn.

In terms of a server for home, two possible solutions to this,

First learn on VMware or other virtual solution on your PC to learn the baciscs.

Second once you know how to do it, think about something like Amazon Cloud, where you can have a whole virtual server that you can play with, so services have very inexensive entry level system you can try. More expensive than a standard cheap hosting service, but more flexible and in my few rewarding.

Third if you work for a nice company they may let you set up a server for your own use, I was very lucky at my last place I was able to do this for a while hosted my blog from there as I lernt.

joehalford01

DevilWAH wrote: »

If you'r not to instreated in web desigen then I would jump stright in to the pre built packages, espicaly if you want to run a blog, a basic blog is easy to create your self but as soon as you want the extra features to look more profisional and incress the user experince you need to get coding and have active content, this becomes a huge project that will take years to learn.

In terms of a server for home, two possible solutions to this,

First learn on VMware or other virtual solution on your PC to learn the baciscs.

Second once you know how to do it, think about something like Amazon Cloud, where you can have a whole virtual server that you can play with, so services have very inexensive entry level system you can try. More expensive than a standard cheap hosting service, but more flexible and in my few rewarding.

Third if you work for a nice company they may let you set up a server for your own use, I was very lucky at my last place I was able to do this for a while hosted my blog from there as I lernt.

I didn't realize Amazon cloud had that, I might check it out. Thanks!

jmreicha

The Amazon hosted route would more than likely impress potential employers, just dress it up really nicely even if you are only doing simple stuff on there, it makes you like like a bawss to them. They hear "cloud this" blah blah blah and get excited so you would have a good first step.

As DevilWAH mentioned the Amazon route is a bit pricier than running your own homegrown webserver though, so you just have to figure out which trade-offs you're willing to live with.