Now, if you want to fulfill the next step of this “creating a new web site” tutorial, you have to decide which software to use to write your web site. The choice is quite wide, but I will describe two main options:
- Doing it all by yourself
- Using WordPress
Doing it all by yourself
It is somewhat easier at the beginning because, there is no real installation. You will be developping your own HTML pages using an HTML editor like Adobe DreamWeaver or GoLive! (please, forget about Microsoft FrontPage which is probably the least useful one; If you don’t want ot pay much, have a look at the free FirstPage 2000Â or FirstPage 2006Â editor).
Using WordPress
Anyway, I would suggest that you install a blog package onto your web site in order to limit the amount of effort you have to spend when updating it. While there is an initial setup phase, it is not long and it will allow you to be up-and-running in less time and to spend less effort in the future.
The one I use and recommend is WordPress. It is a fairly easy-to-use blog package. You can install it in minutes and start immediately to create new content (this is your priority, isn’t it?).
Going to the WordPress web site, you will locate the download page. The package is immediately available in a ZIP of tar.gz compressed archive. Download the archive file, then decompress it on your local disk and publish this decompressed archive to your website.
This way, you will obtain about a hundred files in 5 or 6 directories. If, like me, you were preparing the web site lexyk.com, the visitor entry point will then be  www.lexyk.com/wordpress/ if you installed the package in a separate directory named wordpress (only better for a nice book-keeping and better file management in the long term, but harder on your visitors) or http://www.lexyk.com/ if you installed everything in the root directory of the web site (less clean, but easier to handle both for you and our users).
What is interesting is that despite its simplicity, after these steps, WordPress is installed and visitors can arrive. Obviously, they will have nearly nothing to look for and don’t expect the world to run into your web site, but it’s soothing to see that you can now type news articles for the world to see.
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