I already showed you the easy ways to start blogging. Now i give you some guidelines to start your own website.
Mind you, these suggestions are just what they are, suggestions.

I want a website!

Cool. Good decision. And now make up your mind what kind of website you want….

I know what kind of website i want!

Great. So you want a blog?. Or a portal?. Or just a website…….?

Stop bugging me. What do i need next?

1. Get your website at your favorite ISP.
2. Build your website
3. Done.

That was easy he! But probably you will need some more advice.

1. Register your website at your favorite ISP

Of course your website will need a name. Maybe www.yourtemple.com? So when you know the name you can buy a website with enough space to work with.

There are many ISP (Internet Service Providers) that offer websites in all kinds of varieties. First i would suggest to buy at a well known ISP, or one that has a good standing. Secondly choose a ISP that is in the same area as your website visitors are in. So if you think that your visitors usually reside in the US, then buy a website that also is situated in the US (This you can ask your ISP)

I will give some ISP suggestions that i personally dealt with;

• hostgator.com – Good service, not expensive and reliable
• servage.net – Medium Service, cheap and lots of storage space.

I also have some experience with some local Dutch providers. Some good, some really bad. Do not try to go for the cheapest solution. Usually the service is more important then saving some money.

2. We bought a website. Now what?

2.1 Content management systems….
Now we can build a website. This is the difficult part of this guide. You already made a choice of what kind of website you want. Generally your website will be a Blog, or a bigger website. Luckily for us we don’t need to create a whole new website with all the technical details. There are ready made website systems available on the internet. And they are for free!! So we will use our lazy intelligence and choose a ready made website!!

Here is a list and my personal comments

Website systems (CMS)

• joomla – Very good CMS, with a big community.
• drupal – More difficult CMS, but offers more flexibilty in usage
• mambo – Good CMS
• php-nuke – Good CMS
• etc etc

Web logs (Blogs)

• wordpress – The de-facto standard of blog software
• b2evolution – Unknown to me

There are many more ready made systems available. For a complete list look here.

Recommendations :

• easy blog website : choose wordpress
• easy CMS : go for joomla

2.2 We choose our website system!
You are getting there!. You bought a website and choose to use joomla for example. Now we have to start doing something.
When you bought your website at your ISP you got access to some special web pages to maintain your own website. Big ISP’s are using special programs to do this, for example cPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk. These special web pages can make your life easy. In cPanel for example you can install a website automagically!!!. How about that!. You dont need to waste time on doing it yourself.

At least with hostgator.com (where i registered library108.com) i can choose to install any website system i like. Just like that. If you have good support available from your ISP, then this is the easiest process. (Thats why you need good support!!!)

If possible at your ISP (or else get a good one!!) use their special access pages to install your website system. If in doubt, contact their support line.

3. Are we done?

No. You bought a website. You installed your website software. Now you need to put your own content in the website….

That will come in part 2.

A blog is a website where you can easily post news and other anouncements for the benefit of your congregration and other interested parties. Although a blog usually is limited in functionality compared to a custom build website, the easy of use makes up for that.

Blog here, Blog there…
There are some nice free blogs available to our benefit. I will not mention all of them, only the ones i have personally worked with before:

1. Blogger
2. WordPress

They both have their pro’s and cons and i will not go into that here. You can find that out for yourself here.

Get the Website Quick…
For both blog systems you need to register at their sites. For Blogger you will need to have a gmail account. If you dont have that, then this account will be opened for you when you register. Your website address will be for example mytemple.blogspot.com.

When you register at wordpress.com you can immediately start a blog. This is offered as part of the registration process. The username that you will choose will also be the website address, for example mytemple.wordpress.com.

What will your blog look like ?
With both Blogger and wordpress you can choose from a variety of pre-made layouts (templates). This you can do in the Adminstrative panel (called Dashboard). Blogger supplies a few templates that might suit your needs. WordPress has more templates avaiable but if you want to change colors you need to buy credits to do that. With Blogger you can do this for free.

This blog/website uses the “Digg 3 Column” template and i created my own banner on top. I created this in almost 20 minutes.

Still Not Easy Enough?
You will need some time and knowlegde to get acquainted to both Blog systems. That is unavoidable. But these systems are, by far, the most easy to use and to set up without having to know all the technical details.

This article is not a complete guide on how to set up your blog and does not claim to be one. If you are a complete beginner i suggest to start with Bloggger. If that proves too difficult, then you might consider asking a computer friend to get things going.
When the blog website is created, the posting of articles is even easier. With Blogger you can send an email to your blog that will be published automagically!!.

Some examples

• This site of course   (build on wordpress)
• amsterdam.harekrishna.nl   (Blogspot blog redirected to our own domain)