The Unbelievably Simple & Quick Way I Create New Web Sites

This week I have been busy writing new articles and book reviews an uploading them to my websites. All of this has entailed quite a bit of technical work to get the pages formatted and published online.

As you may or may not know, I have 10 websites. I work on these every week and sometimes every day, depending on my writing and publishing schedule.

Anyways, in the very beginning (what seems like eons ago) I had absolutely no idea how to create a website. And being the quiet control freak that I am I wanted to learn how to do it so that I didn't have to rely on someone else to create a website for me. So I took an expensive web design course and learned how to write basic HTML code.

Those were the days before the invention on Blogging software so everyone had to rely on HTML coding to build websites.

And what I found was that even though HTML code looks daunting and confusing when you don't understand it, it's actually quite easy to understand and to write.

So I completed my course, received my diploma in web page design, and because the course was set out to take me through building AND publishing a website (my final assignment was to email my tutor the URL of my completed site to show that it was "live" on the internet), I already had my first website up and running.

Then I designed and published another, which, while not great, was enough to get plenty of visitors and start me on the road to becoming an online entrepreneur through my writing and web site building.

You can see my first website for writers at http://writeaholics.net/www.writeaholic.co.uk/index.htm but promise you won't laugh (well, alright then, have a chuckle if you want).

Then a few years later, along came blogging software. Everyone started using it because it meant you could have a website (a blog) online in minutes without needing to know any coding.

Except...that if you didn't know coding, you couldn't make any changes to your blog. So it had to stay the basic boring design and look like everyone else's. Or you could use a template so that it would look like all the other blogs that had the same template added to it.

I did try to have a blog for a while but I wasn't happy about using software that I didn't understand. I no longer felt in control of what I was doing AND I had to be online to update my blog, which I never had to do with my websites. I'd create them off-line and then go online only to upload the new pages.

I used WordPress software for my blog, which was easy to use, but without my HTML knowledge, I wouldn't  have been able to change it's appearance or tweak it to look the way I wanted it to.

In the end I gave up on blogging software although I do still have one of my niche websites running on WordPress (and I started this incredibly easy to use Blogger blog) but all the rest are HMTL sites.

In the beginning I used to write all the HTML code myself, which was time consuming, but it did mean that I knew every bit of my websites' source codes by heart and could make changes whenever I wanted.

Then I started using free web design software to speed up the process of creating web pages.

But, back then, what was available was quite limiting as to what it could do. These are called WYSIWYG (pronounced Wizzy-Wig) editors because it stands for What You See Is What You Get. They are nothing flash, but they are faster to use than writing every teeny-tiny piece of code yourself.

Eventually I moved on to buying the biggest and best web page editor available and that is Adobe's mighty Dreamweaver.

Admittedly, because I'm not as skilled at designing web pages as I could/should be, there is a lot to Dreamweaver that I still don't know how to use.

But one thing I do know is that it has speeded up my web page creation remarkably.

This software is so huge and powerful, that if I move a web page (drag and drop) from one folder to another in my website directory (all web pages are stored in files, and files within files up to several deep), Dreamweaver will immediately update all the links to that page right across my website so I don't have to update anything.

I can then click on Syncronize Website in the menu and it will show a list of pages that have been updated with new links to the page and I can upload them all in one click.

How easy is that?

And it all started with learning basic HTML code. It was one of the best things I ever did. And I've progressed from sitting and writing (typing) HTML code by hand, to using the mighty Dreamweaver software and tweaking and changing my blog to suit what I want.

Learning how to write HTML code was the best start to creating my own websites that I could have ever had. It's one thing I'll never regret spending time on.

And because I found it so easy I went on to create my own course in writing HTML code and building websites and it has been selling regularly for the last few years, all over the world and is still helping others to create all their own websites for free.

It's called The Complete Online Course and you can see it at http://newonlinecourse.net.

If you've ever wanted to create all your own websites, it's a step I can highly recommend.

It's difficult working on the internet when you don't know what you're doing.

But a good basic understanding of the important fundamentals can take you a long way.