Personal Website provider?

Geek alert!

I recently discovered FileZilla , a very powerful, free FTP client. Highly recommended!

Thanks for the heads-up on filezilla. I just DL and so far it seems really good!!

Jack

A different/side view of this great topic...

There is very real shift, an industry disruption, occurring right now in Content Delivery; CONTENT IS KING.   Regardless of the process or method of delivery (for fee or free) of services, the key is to focus on is "quality of content" and /or quality of the "end user experience".... these are the catch phases of today's market.  Google paid 1.6 Billion for You Tube due to the "Long Tail" content phenomena (long discussion, but very relevant to this discussion) for a very good reason.

Due to the webs ubiquitous reach, like it or not, people will and are paying (via advertising models) for content.  And it will be time shifted (when we want it, where we want it, on what device we want it on) and not necessarily "produced" by  the media as we know it today.  Folks that are doing appealing, artistic and interesting things like a bunch of people on this thread, will play a real role in hundreds of thousands of micro transactions that are/will add up to real money for someone or some company. 

So regardless of your ambitions-  artistic, monetary, or both, realize that the content you are creating/producing today could have important impacts in the months and years to come as IP related services permeate the Mobility Market (cell phones), Cable Markets (very serious upstream and down stream increases are just around the corner via DOCSIS 3.0), and IPTV (ADSL2+ and FTTH- FTTH is the ultimate answer for home communications).  You could very well be approached by the current giants of the content distributors, or be a part of new models that none of us could dream of today. 

There is a real battle shaping up NOW between the Content Providers (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Disney, and on and on) and the traditional Service Providers (your Cable company, your Cell company, your Telco), for consumers time and attention (advertising attention).

They, the SP's and Google's or the world, all only care about content as the enticement to keep or gain customers: Feeds and speeds of delivery are only a very small part of the equation.   IP is definitely disruptive and an enabler, and it allows one person to have major impact in any one particular endeavor (skiing!).    So keep up the high quality of content production if your even semi serious about your passion. 

Side note-  many absolute expert skiers, climbers, adventures, never, ever seek fame and fortune and that's another topic ... so my commentary was only related to the threat-  content distribution.  Content is King.

It depends on your motivation - I used to use Geocities.com and .Mac when I just wanted to share a few pictures with friends and family, and they were both adequate. I think a blog is a good way to do that now, and it's free ( www.blogger.com/start ). You're a bit limited in terms of format and function, but it looks good right out of the box with no need to learn an application and encourages your readers to comment. Several people on TAY have nice ones detailing their ski adventures.

When I started buying domain names for my sites I starting using GoDaddy.com to host (I also bought the domain names through them) as the prices seemd reasonable. One downside is they are geared toward people who deal in domain names professionally and send you all kinds of offers (many very tempting), but I've had no complaints about service in the last four years.

I also gave up using FrontPage as I got tired of the extraneous code (and outright errors) it puts in, plus the FTP function was balky and very slow. I learned to write HTML in Notepad following the directions on www.w3schools.com , which are as comprehensive as you want and also free. This approach is only appropriate for those with a "project" mentality, it will take a few weeks to get the basics of writing HTML and style sheets, and even then you probably won't like the way your pages look. Like Lowell says, one effective way of getting a look you like is finding another site that pleases you, viewing the source HTML, and modifying it for your purposes - then copying the format repeatedly for your subsequent pages.

frontpage is pretty awful, i've actually used it a few times. :-[

when i was first starting out i used netscape composer, which was very simple on probably on your computer if you installed the netscape browser. it was WYSIWYG and only wrote basic tags which is all you need and makes it easier to learn. now usually i am just opening a previously created page with notepad and modifying it. you might check the mozilla.org website and see what they are up to now - it's all free and open source.

I was soooo right! No one will see this, but the shift happened a while back, and it will continue to accelerate. Goodbye to Cable first, then Sat... It all seems so natural now. IP.

please let it snow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!