You got me!  Tell me…..there’s so much out there!  Oh, you want ME to tell YOU?  Well this is what I know so far….

First of all, I had to remember that a registrar is where you buy your name.  You can go and do a WHO IS Lookup to see if you can find the name you want.  If it’s available, you can buy it; if it’s not, they give you all sorts of ideas to modify it.  Note:  if you don’t buy right away, some lurkers out there know what you’ve looked at and they snatch it up and offer it to you the next day for double the price!

When you have your name, that’s not the end of your troubles, then you have to find some place that will store all the stuff you want to put on your website using your name.  That’s a HOST.  Sounds kind of like Dax on Deep Space Nine.

Well, a host isn’t going to be nice and let you just tag along, you have to pay for the space you take up.  So of course you can buy any kind of space you want.  The more you want, the more money it costs.  Seems reasonable, right

So I went searching.  Well, here’s what I know.  I did NOT find a really cheap hosting rate anywhere.  I’m already paying GoDaddy $12/year or maybe it’s $18, I can’t remember.  I really want a new domain name, so I did some shopping today.

First, I read the article about the top web hosting sites and went to check them all out.  Well, Name.com and Namecheap.com were paid for in Euros.  I decided since I didn’t want to translate that, it would be fine to skip those.  I tried DreamHost, which in turn sends people over to Enom, which is where I have a couple old domain names. It is only $8.95 though. When I tried to find those old domains, I found that Google was holding them.  When I went to google, I couldn’t find them.  Sometimes I think this whole thing is a scam—now you see it, now you don’t! I decided that I didn’t like what I was finding out—too complicated.

I also checked out Top 10 Domain Registration.com It was another big mess of confusion trying to entice you into buying from them, but one quote I really liked:

“Of course, today, a domain name is more than just an address. It helps define your website’s online identity, and plays a big part in building the character of your online presence. Every individual wants their identity to be memorable and unique, and everyone wants their online identity to be the same. This is why choosing a great domain name and a reliable domain registration site is so important. It will help make your website stand out from the crowd. It will help give your site an identity.”

I did see that most of the sites give you a free name if you’d buy space on their server (host), so I didn’t look much further for domain name costs.  (I did have an ad in my inbox for a 99 cent domain name from Go Daddy.  I think it’s a scam to “get you in the door” since they put their price for hosting at $3.49/month instead of the yearly rate.)  Google charges $11.95 a little under GoDaddy, which is $12.00.  Gandi net is $15.00.  Register is $31!  Crazy!  It may have included extras that I didn’t know about.  Then Hover was $12.99, which was pretty close to GoDaddy!  Google is just $12.00 and it has a lot of extras, like connecting to WordPress, but it also says there is google telephone support.  I need that now and can’t find it, so that might just be a sales tactic!

All in all, I like what’s easiest, so a dollar here or there doesn’t matter to me.  Right now that seems to be GoDaddy, but I get really sick of their deals and their emails telling me my site is expiring 6 months before hand so they can scare me into giving them more money sooner.

I don’t like the Evil Empire Google, just because it’s so big, so….I’m torn.  I keep going back to trying to have everything in the same place for ease of finding it back again, so I may just have to stick with GoDaddy. That’s where cindeekarns.com is.

In the end, I chose Word Press for my register AND my host.  It was $13.00 + another $5.00 to host my blog there.  What would be nice is to have all of my domains at the same place.  That, however, would take an entirely new post to explain and includes stuff I don’t know about like DNS and mirrors and probably trolls under the bridges.

So, there you have it. Now you know as much as I do and you can also learn to design a web page from scratch!

I live in the Chugach Mountains almost at the end of Eagle River Road.  It’s gorgeous.  It follows the river on one side and the mountains on the other.  Side roads mostly go up!  Many of them have signs that warn, “Do not drive without 4 wheel drive or chains.”   After many, many years of a narrow windy road up through the valley (and many bicycle/car/moose accidents) it was decided that we finally needed a new wider, straighter, flat road.  I was sad.  I really liked the old road.

As it is with most things…..bigger, newer, better, but it’s come with a painful price:  2 years of road construction and they still might have to continue next summer!  Through it all I’ve had to spend countless hours waiting, watching, learning new patterns, and following the darned pilot car.

So it is with my experience with web design.  I can get by with what I’ve been doing.  It works just fine.  It’s slow.  It sometimes has pot holes. It takes a while to get where I have been going, but I know that if I would go through the pain of constructing a new road to follow, I would be able to get places much faster and it would look a lot bigger, newer and better.

This fall I’ve started my own construction process—ugh.  I’d like to take you through what I’ve done so far:  picked out my favorite tool to use.  To do that you’ll have to follow me:  the pilot car!

To start, I didn’t even know which tool to use.  I remembered an old tool I used back in the late 90s:  Netscape Communicator.  I would type up what I wanted, push a button to show me the HTML code, copied it and pasted it into my web page.  So even though my instructor told me to begin with TEXT EDIT, I went looking on the interwebs for my good old friend, Netscape Communicator.  It was no where to be found.

With saddness, I went back to the instructions and started with TEXT EDIT, which is what came with my Mac.  It was painful.  I typed in the box, saved it as an HTML file, opened my browser, found the saved file and opened it to see if it worked.  WAY TOO MANY STEPS–especially since it took me several times to get it right.  I did it, but TEXT EDIT was not bigger, better, newer.  I knew technology couldn’t have gone backwards in the 14 years I was away.

I went back to the interwebs and discovered what I wanted was something called a “WYSIWYG” (what you see is what you get).  I found Sea Monkey.  It’s actually a free web browser.  You can go up to the top, pull down on NEW and get a composer page. At the bottom, there are tabs to show you what the code looks like, where the tags are, previews, etc.  That was going to be MUCH faster than TEXT EDIT.   I was relieved.  It was much like my old friend Netscape.  I now felt better about having a tool I felt comfortable with.

With Sea Monkey in my back pocket, I continued following the path my instructor put me on in order to discover the best tools I needed for the construction of my web page.  It was suggested I try TEXT WRANGLER.  So I downloaded that one and I quickly knew it was important for something, but it certainly wasn’t what I needed to get started.  I know that back in the 90s I was using FTP for something, but I couldn’t remember what.  So I quickly ditched that tool.  Maybe I’ll need it later in construction.

Moving on……I was flagged down by my instructor to check out the best WYSIWYG softwares on her favorite blog:  lifehaker.com.  DreamWeaver and others were on the list, but the only free one was KOMPOZER.  I downloaded it.  Just like Sea Monkey, my computer warned me not to download it, but I did anyway.  It MAY be a good thing, but until I figured it out, I didn’t like it.  KOMPOZER won’t let you restart your computer unless you force quit it.  I suppose that protects you from losing everything, but it was annoying until I figured it out.  KOMPOZER acted a lot like

Sea Monkey.     I clicked the tabs at the bottom and got to see what the code that I wrote looked like right away.  It really helps when you can correct your mistakes right away and check it again.  I think that side bar on the left might come in handy as well.

I pulled over and took a break from choosing my construction tools and just started doing the assignment.  It may be that I skipped something last week, because this week I found W3SCHOOL’s “Try it yourself” button.  Now that was even better!  I could put in code on the left and then see it happen on the right.  NICE!  I played with that tool a long time, until I had to start googling things I wanted to learn, like how to turn the language into German.  I know……it was a rabbit hole.  I discoveredthat you can put a code saying that it’s in German, but it doesn’t translate it for you.  So I’m not sure why you need that code.  So far, for ease of use, I liked W3Schools.

The last tool I checked out was JSFiddle.  I liked that one too.  Since I don’t know CSS yet, I decided it was a Cadillac, when I only need a Ford right now.  So I played with it some and it MAY come in useful in the future, but for now…..while I’m just learning, I really like the side by side W3School’s tool.  Trial and Error is a pretty good teaching tool (as long as no one is hitting you with a ruler for getting it wrong.)  So, I’ve picked out my bulldozer.  As the refining process continues, I’m sure I will need some of the other more fancy tools.  But right now…..I’m just bulldozing.  By the end of the course, I hope to be doing the finish work like they are doing on my road right now.  It will be nice when both my website and my road are bigger, newer, and better.