Create your own website - with the minimum of tears

I am fortunately experienced enough to be able to create my own website from scratch - as I did with my travel website synergise.com - although it was a hard learning-curve. But when I wanted to create my author website, iankingsley.com, I decided it might be worthwhile investigating easier methods since the site would be considerably smaller. As a result I ended up trying out quite a lot of 'website builders': websites offering you the means of creating a website without getting involved in the background technicalities (such as HTML, cascading stylesheets, etc).

In the end, none were quite right for me, because I had some very specific needs involving interaction and random page text generation, but they would be suitable for most people who just want to create a simple first website with the minimum of tears: whether personal or business. I therefore decided to write a couple of articles to help you assess which might be best for you. If this interests you, I invite you to read Simple website generation using website builders.

If you can use a word processor, then using most of these website builders is not much more difficult. Most of them allow you to try them out for free, and this is a great way to find out which one suits you before you invest considerable time and effort. My articles are designed to minimise the time it will take you. I do hope you find them useful. The great thing about website builders is that you generally start out with a professional looking template and no one need guess you did it yourself.

A personal website is a must today for any published author, since it provides a hub where all your other online presence points; the website then becomes you point-of-sale, where you can place your sales pitch. As such, it should be the first thing you create: even it if is only a page or so, at first. It will give you the chance to buy your own long-term domain name and thereby get all your other online presence to pointing to this. That way, even if you change the method you use to edit your website, or your web host, everything will already be set up for you and you will never loose any older links.

I wish you the best of luck creating your own website.