Maximum PC

Hi,
I'm going to try to make a website this summer for my own person experimentation. I will most likely be using Microsoft Frontpage 2003, since its what I have available. I am trying to get recommendations for hosting my website. Like I said, never done this before, but from what i am seeing, most hosters place their advertisements on their websites, which I would like to keep to a minimum. Just trying to get some advice. Thanks

There are two ways you can go about this, pay for someone to host your files, or host them yourself.

If you decide to have someone host your website for you, you can either use a free service or a paid for service. Free services will mostly be ad supported and won't support any server side scripting like php or asp. A possible exception is google sites. As for paid for services, godaddy should be a good choice.

If you decide to host your website yourself, depending on what you're going to do, you may or may not have to install software on your computer. If all you're going to be doing is html, css, javascript, you can just point your browser to where the files are on your harddrive and you can view them. If you want more functionality, you'll need to install a server, such as Apache or IIS. If you want to use PHP, you'll also have to install PHP as well. For this I'd recommend installing a LAMP or WAMP system (Linux/Windows Apache MySQL PHP), since it will take care of the configuration between the different components.

When it comes to building the actual website if you use FrontPage there are a few considerations. FrontPage relies on the server hosting the website to have what are known as FrontPage Extensions installed for certain features within FrontPage to function. Yes, you can build a website in FrontPage and upload it to a server that does not have FrontPage Extensions installed, however, the features that rely on the FP extensions will not work. Additioonally, many WPPs (Web Presence Providers) are no longer supporting the FP extensions as FP is getting a little old. Actually borderline obsolete.

Within the Microsoft family FP has been replaced with ExpressionWeb. Now as to just messing around something you may want to consider trying is Visual Web Developer Express which is free with plenty of good tutorials out there.

Everything I mention so far is designed to run on a Microsoft Server platform in the interest of keeping things simple.

If you come back with an idea of what you want the site to do we can get more into things.

Ron