“I just signed up for hosting, now what do I do?” This is a
common question that we receive at YMX Hosting, so we’re happy to help
you turn your dream of a self-hosted blog or youth ministry site into a
reality. The best thing is that if you are willing to learn you can do
most things for free.
Unlike free website options like Blogger
or WordPress, a self-hosted site is much less limited. You could use
web publishing tools like Frontpage or iWeb, or you could use one of
the many Open Source programs that are quickly dominating the web
world. (Open Source translates practically to “free.”)
For novice users, we strongly recommend choosing from this list of free tools.
Filezilla:
This is a free FTP client. And I nearly force every YMX Hosting user to
install it to get started. Basically, that means you will be able to
upload and download data from your desktop computer to your web server.
As a new web developer, you’ll be using your FTP client all the time.
Filezilla is not only one of the best FTP clients, it’s 100% free and
easy to use.
Notepad:
That’s right. This little program installed automatically with Windows
Operating systems is very powerful for publishing web content. Why is
that? Notebook is the simplest way to remove all the formatting that a
group of text may have when you write it in Word or copying something
from the internet. To use it, copy the text you’d like to publish
(control-C) and paste it into Notepad. Then do the same procedure and
copy the text into your text editor of your website. Trust us, this
will save you lots of time!
WordPress:
This Open Source, web-based software package can be installed directly
from Fantastico on any YMX Hosting site. (Literally, can be installed
within 2 minutes) Over the past couple of years WordPress has continued
to get better and better. In fact, for 99% of youth ministry sites and
all blogs, I would suggest WordPress. There are thousands of free
templates to chose from as well as hundreds of awesome free plugins.
Which will help your site do anything from manage events to run your
podcast.
Of course, there are many other options out there.
These are just the suggestions of someone who helps a lot of beginners
get rolling. For some, they quickly outgrow these options and find
something they prefer better. But you simply can’t beat the price and
the power of these free tools.
One software package that is worth the money you pay for it.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0
For some odd reason, Adobe packaged the most common features of a
several hundred dollar software package into a slightly stripped down
version for less than $100. We use Elements for everything and it’s
very much worth it’s price.
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