The Energon Pub

If I were to start my own website...
1. How would I go about buying a domain name? Like seibertron.com, does Ryan own the domain name, 1 time purchase? Or can you only lease it, cronic payments?
2. Would I need some kind of special software to create and maintain the site?

I'm not saying I wanna start competing with Seibertron. Actually, for what I have in mind, I'd be competing more with Wildfur.

1. Getting a domain name is a doddle. No, you probably won't own it, but you'll be able to renew the lease on it when it's due to expire. They don't cost that much, either. I got mine through UKReg.com, but presumably you'll be better off with a local company, just do a Google search for Canadian or US domain companies. My domain (which is a '.co.uk') cost me £5 for two years' lease, so it's hardly extortionate. '.com's tend to be smidge more expensive, but not by that much.

I don't think Ryan owns Seibertron.com, either. If I remember rightly, I think he once said something about long-term leasing it; paying for it about ten or twelve years in advance.

2. No, you don't need special editing software or anything. You can get WYSIWYG programs, like Microsoft Frontpage for example, that theoretically make the job easier, but personally I've never used any of 'em. All you really need, you already have - Notepad, WordPad, and I believe the later editions of Word can all form HTML files.

I started just by learning some basic HTML, which is surprisingly easy. I had a day off work and decided to research the subject, found "fluffbucket.com" and messed with the tutorials. After just five hours I was randomly trawling the web, and a lot of sites I was looking at and thinking "I can already do better than that". Nowadays I'd actually recommend "w3schools.com" for HTML and CSS tutorials. It's well worth a try; you'll be surprised how quickly you can get into it.

Ok...my registar states about domains

The owner of any domain registered through iPower is the customer that is registering the domain. Unlike some companies, we do not take ownership of your domain. This allows you to make changes to the domain at any time because YOU are the legal owner of the domain name.

I only use companies that allow you to own the domain. True you have to register it as yours every year or few years but you are the legal owner of the domain. So within that time if you want to sell the domain then you can!

You don't have to have special software in most cases. You lease space on a server and usually they provide website building tools. Some have templates you can use. It is good to have an ftp program to upload files. A free FTP program that I know of is called Filezilla though I use WSFTP pro.

Best way to learn HTML for a beginner is to find a tutorial online and play with html.

learn html code. once you've got that, it's all about what you can construct

ThunderThruster wrote:learn html code. once you've got that, it's all about what you can construct

and the best place to do so is http://www.w3schools.com

If you want to use a design software, don't be stupid inuf to use FrontPage. It's crap, best is to use a Html editor, it's realy easy and is fun, to get free and good software for almoest anything try this:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&sa=X& ... ce&spell=1

This is a open source website you shuld be able to get anithing you desier from it like 3D programing, animation, web- and ilustrationsotware.