Websites and other creative endeavors

If you are seeking to build your own website, you have some choices to make. 1) A good hosting company. There are a ton of them out there, ask around to see who other people you know are using. You also have to pick a name. (It is easier to actually buy your domain from whom ever you decide to host with, just for the ease of not having to transfer it.) 2) Once you choose your name and host, now you have to decide how you want to build your site. Do you want to use one of their already made, add your content, ready-set-go sites, or do you want to download a template and make your changes from that, OR do you want to completely build it from scratch?

In working on my third website, www.SageVA.com , I have learned more about building websites than I ever sought. The whole Internet is fascinating to me. There is so much information out there, I cant even begin to know a portion of it. So I stick with my little corner to try and become very good at what little I do know. I use cpanel. That is my favorite way to build a site. It may be for beginners (I don't know) but I think it works just fine, my site doesn't look any 'less' professional than the next. I chose to buy my domain and web hosting with Bravenet.com, I don't know if it is any better than other hosting companies, I do like it better than a few others I have chosen in the past. I like to use free programs and templates because they are as good as the ones you purchase (sometimes better) and I have access. Picasa is the program I like to use for artists galleries, CSS templates is my preference as far as complete site templates go. Many good ones to choose from that can be tweaked and modeled how ever you want. I am also learning zen-cart. A free program in a class of open source commerce, basically a shopping cart but this is the whole shebang, its a little more complicated at first but I'm finding it very user friendly and once you have your whole cart built, the changes are simple. I downloaded Filezilla from Mozilla to use as an FTP client. This will basically up or download giant files for you much faster.

I could go on and on, I guess I have learned more than I thought. If you have any questions, you can contact me. I'm open to helping out. Building your own website is a ton of work but also pretty satisfying when its done. Shelley@sageva.com I wish you much success! If you don't feel like taking the task on, of course I can do it for you (that's my pitch).

I plan on adding links to my cloud computing program so clients can have access straight from my site. I am also adding paypal access.