BrianJarrett.com

Things in the world of personal pages have changed pretty dramatically over the past several years. When I first got online, around 1998, personal pages were clunky and difficult. That’s why I ended up teaching myself html. Companies like Geocities and Angelfire offered webspace and maybe some rudimentary tools for designing pages and that was about all. html editors were on the market but despite allowing users to create html pages it provided very little in the realm of site design and navigation.

Somewhere along the way (I was a little late on this trend) weblogs, or “blogs”, came into being. The blog allowed end users to provide content the same as a personal page did but, more importantly, it provided an attractive, cohesive, navigable design. The blog ended up being a specialized CMS (Content Management System) and, in my opinion, was the missing link between good web site design and personal content delivery.

I’ve had some kind of crappy web page online since 1998, albeit in different forms and with different providers. Once I finally starting hosting things myself in 2003 I became very interested in content delivery. After coding my own pages (and unknowingly re-inventing the wheel) I discovered blogging tools. Since then I’ve never looked back.

This article is focused on getting a personal page online. What I’ve found is that a lot of people want to get online but don’t know how to do it. They also don’t want to pay a lot to do it since often their target audience is small and can’t justify the investment. My aim is to sort out some of the confusing stuff and suggest a cheap and easy way to get online.

I’m going to presume you have a connection to the Internet. You really can’t proceed if you don’t. I’m also going to presume you have some idea of the content you want on your site. If not I’d suggest you take a moment and figure out what you want to say. If you can’t think of anything then you might be going through a lot of work for nothing.

Starting A Blog

Having said that we’ll now start with what I consider to be the first technical step of this process, starting a blog. The blog will be your personal site. Blogs have hit the mainstream now; I hear the term on the national news and other places all the time. I’m not sure if all these people know what they’re talking about but they’re talking about it nonetheless. There are several options for choosing a blogging engine but the cheapest way is to sign up with a site that offers it for free. My recommendation is Wordpress.com. I self-host and use a version of Wordpress on my site (it is my site actually) but they also offer a free, hosted version as well. All you do is point your browser to Wordpress.com and fill out the form. You’ll have a blog in a matter of minutes.

Details on how the blogging engine works is out of scope for this article but they have excellent documentation on their site. The simple explanation is you create posts that will be displayed on your main page. You can categorize them however you choose. You can also create pages; this is for content that doesn’t change as often like an “About You” page or a page concerning a hobby or interest of yours. You can check out my example Wordpress.com blog to get a preview of what it all looks like. The service is free and does not contain any ads or other annoying stuff.

You might even want your own domain. You can now buy domains super cheap, and most registrars will allow you to redirect to another site. Basically this just means that you buy a domain like “mydomain.com” and then you say point to “myblog.wordpress.com”. It’s a pretty simple process and you don’t have to deal with any of the complexities of DNS. This is my recommendation to anyone who wants to do this cheap and easy. I buy my domains from Dynonames.com but there are plenty of domain registrars out there. GoDaddy, Yahoo, and others sell domains for cheap. Don’t pay more than $10 per year per domain though; more than that is a rip off.

Photos

Once you’ve gotten online with a blog and have posted some stuff you might want to add some pictures. Photos seem to be a big reason to have a web site, especially for me. I put tons of pictures of my son on my site. You can add photos to Wordpress but it’s a tedious process if you have a lot of them (not to mention disk space constraints). There are hosted photo solutions out there. One of them is Flickr, an online photo gallery now owned by Yahoo! At it’s core Flickr allows you to upload images to their servers and then display them in albums to others. There is a free version with some restrictions and a paid version (about $25 per year at the time of this writing) which has all those restrictions removed. The paid service had unlimited bandwith, uploads, albums, etc. and is an inexpensive way to put pictures out on the web for friends, family or whoever.

What’s also nice is that Flickr integrates with Wordpress.com so you can show thumbnails in your blog and allow others to easily find your images.

Conclusion

I think this is one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective ways to get yourself online. You can start with a blog for free. If you want to add a domain it’s about $8-$10, then maybe add online photos for about $25.00 per year. $35 total per year is under $3.00 per month, if you go all out. I’d consider that pretty cheap.

You might wonder how MySpace plays into all this. I plan to release another article on why I feel that although MySpace is not a replacement for a blog or personal page it does have it’s place in the grand scheme of things. Look for that soon.