Creating a Website Tutorial
Publishing Your Website
Now that you have your website ready to put up for the rest of the world to see, then what? In this lesson, we'll explore your options from a free web hosting service to purchasing your own domain name and making your site pay for itself!
Free Web Hosting
You have several options for hosting your website absolutely free of charge to you, such as Tripod, or your own ISP provider may give you your own little spot on the web.
There are three very big drawbacks to these free web hosting providers, however. One, they have to stay in business somehow, and they do so by putting advertising on your webpage whether you want it or not. And two, it usually points to an ugly URL based on their own domain name. And three, if you ever do decide to get really serious about a website and want to do some programming—such as with PHP, ASP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails or whatever languages you prefer—the vast majority of free web hosting providers don't allow it. For most of you, that third concern won't be very relevant, but it is a limitation you should be aware of.
Paid Web Hosting
Which brings us to paid web hosting. Web hosting accounts nowdays are incredibly cost effective, and you should have very little trouble finding a web hosting provider to host your website and purchase your own domain name (such as www.yourname.com or any other available domain of your choice) for less than $5 per month with none of the drawbacks of a free web hosting provider. Even better, you typically get more space and bandwidth to put up photos from Aunt Harriet's 80th birthday party or your vacation to Walt Disney World.
And, the biggest little secret of all—you can actually get all these benefits for 'free.' Remember how those free web hosting providers pay the bills? Online advertisements. With your own domain name with your own paid web hosted service, you can put up the ads where you want, whenever you want and pocket the money yourself. If you buy a domain name and web hosting provider that costs less than $5 per month, your ads would only have to earn 17 cents per day to break even! That's amazingly easy to do. More likely, you'll come out way ahead. Remember, those free web hosting providers aren't trying to break even, they're trying to make a profit off of your content. It's time to turn that around and start making a profit off of your own content.
You can choose to pay the $5/month expense and host your website completely ad free—there's certainly nothing wrong with that! But if you're looking for a 'free' alternative or even desire to earn a few bucks for your content and troubles, let me introduce you to Google AdSense.
The Easiest Money You've Ever Earned
Google has a program that allows you, the content provider, to display relevant ads on your website, and you'll earn anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars for each time someone clicks on an ad. You decide where to put the ads, you decide how big the ads should be, and you decide what colors they should be. Google will then examine that page trying to figure out what your page is about, then it'll automatically display advertisements relevant to the topic in question.
Want to see an example? Look just above this paragraph of this page. That's a Google ads. The actual ads change over time and even from visit to visit, but for this page, you'll likely see ads about domain names and web hosting providers. There are Google ads on every single page of this tutorial, and Atlas Quest earns just a little bit of money every time someone reads these tutorials, notices those ads, and thinks, "Hey, that looks interesting," and clicks it.
This is not the road to riches—it is just a simple way to help pay for the cost of a paid web hosting provider, and perhaps earn a few extra bucks to see a movie in the process. You're generating content anyhow, so you may as well be compensated for it. Once you sign up for Google AdSense, they'll provide you a page with questions about what kind of ads to display, how many ads to display, the colors that should be used to match your website, among other questions. At the end, it will give you a small piece of code to be inserted in your webpage where the ads should be displayed.
Then you go to sleep and forget about it. Over the days, weeks, and months to come, people who view your webpage will see your ads. And a small fraction of them will notice those ads, see something interesting and click.
But a disclaimer: Nobody can guarantee you'll make money. Nobody can guarantee it'll even pay for the cost of your domain name and web hosting service. But 17 cents a day is a very low hurdle to overcome and the vast majority of websites should have no trouble paying for itself through Google AdSense.
The one suggestion I can provide—if you decide to try out Google AdSense—is to only put ads on pages with a lot of text. Google decides what ads to display based on the content of your page and unless you have a lot of text, they won't be able to determine what ads are relevant. If you create a letterbox clue, provide detailed directions on how to drive to the trail head. Use the names of cities or towns along the way. If the letterbox is planted in an area rich in history, write in your clue a short history of the area and the person or persons involved. If you tell someone to look behind the third tree on your right and that's the whole clue, you aren't going to get any relevant ads that people are going to click.
Recommended Web Hosting Providers
So you're ready to buy your own domain name, host your own clues and start making money? The hardest decision is simply trying to find where to host your website. Hundreds of web hosting providers exist, perhaps thousands. I'd love to suggest the hosting provider for Atlas Quest, but this is a large website with extraordinary needs beyond simple clue hosting and in good faith is not recommended for the typical person hosting clues. (It's a great company—but serious overkill for merely hosting letterboxing clues!)
However, here are some choices that are recommended:
InMotion Hosting
These folks have a $5.95/month plan that looks good for most letterboxers.
BlueHost
This web host provider I've also heard very good things about, though it's a little more expensive at $6.95/month (again, at the time of this writing). However, it does include the cost of the domain name in that price and gives you substantially more disk space than cheaper options.
Getting Your Website Online
Unfortunately, there's not one correct way of doing this. Each web hosting provider may have slightly different instructions for getting your files online. Almost all of them will allow you to use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program to copy your files from your personal computer to the live website, and I use FTP Commander for that purpose. You typically supply the username and password for your account to log in, usually after connecting to an FTP server such as ftp.hostingprovider.com on port 21, then copy the necessary files or directories over to the live site. The exact details vary depending on your web hosting provider, but they will provide specific instructions for uploading your website once you've signed up.