Big time newbie question

help!

[breny]

I am an affiliate of a program that provides a template site, allows you to brand it with your own domain, and will host it for you. I'm doing this but I'm already seeing the drawbacks, such as not being able to add content, links, or check stats for incoming traffic. Just FYI, it's a consumer product, not a ebook or anything like that.

I want to develop a site for my brand, find a host and use the merchant's datafeed to add the products I want to carry. I've never done a site before (hence the reason I went with their easy-breezy option).

How do I start? I'm very computer literate and understand a TINY bit about html (mostly changing colors, fonts, etc). If I find a template I like, how do I make changes to it? How do I load the data? How do I decide what host to use? I see the numbers on hosting sites (5 GB for 8.95 a month or whatever) but I have no idea what that means in terms of a site.

I hope I'm not being lazy by asking these questions. I've tried doing a search on this and other forums but I just find little bits and pieces and mostly answers to questions from other people that know more than me already.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[skippy]

Welcome to Webmasterworld Breny

Here is a good place to start to answer most of your questions.

[webmasterworld.com ]

Good Luck

[robotsdobetter]

It's easier than what you may think to start a site, just keep going and you will learn! About 6 or 7 years ago when I first started my site I knew very little about HTML, PHP, CGI, etc.

If you find a template you like you can change it by changing the HTML or you can buy software like FrontPage which does the HTML for you.

When getting a host you should make sure you can use/have....

1) PHP
2) CGI
3) Your own Domain
4) Sub Domains
5) Your own email accounts
6) FTP Manager
7) Access Logs
8) 99% uptime
9) MySQL
10) Server Sides Includes

GB Example: Every time one of your web pages is loaded by a visitor, the size of that page goes towards your bandwidth usage.

Let's say you got 40GBs this is about how many hits you could get in a month...

Page size 30kb - 1,398,101 views
Page size 50kb - 838,861 views

For a new site you won't need many GBs, but make sure you can upgrade as needed. If you are not sure what web host you should look at try Ipowerweb web hosting and Yahoo! web hosting. There are many different web hosts out there, so just compare them to each other and see which one is best for you. You may want to visit sites that compare them for you.

[breny]

Thank you both. Skippy, I checked most of the articles on your list. I'm still plowing through some of them trying to find the information I need.

Robots---thank you! That's exactly the kind of information I want! Your list makes it much easier to compare hosting options. I also hadn't thought of looking for a site that compares them for you. I usually do that when looking for other stuff, but it didn't occur to me to do that when looking for hosting.

Does anyone else have any specific suggestions?

[breny]

Thank you both. Skippy, I checked most of the articles on your list. I'm still plowing through some of them trying to find the information I need.

Robots---thank you! That's exactly the kind of information I want! Your list makes it much easier to compare hosting options. I also hadn't thought of looking for a site that compares them for you. I usually do that when looking for other stuff, but it didn't occur to me to do that when looking for hosting.

Does anyone else have any specific suggestions?