How to set up your own family web site (Part 1)

I get comments all the time from people who like our site and wish they had the knowledge to create one.

It’s really not that hard.  Especially if you use a publishing platform like WordPress.  I recently offered to help a buddy set up their site, but figured since I was going to write instructions for him I’d also publish them for the benefit of others.

There are a million ways to do this and and it can be confusing.  I don’t claim that what I’m about to share is the ‘best’ way or the ‘only’ way.   But it is an option.

The Quick and Easy Way

Basically dishers.com is a blog.  It has some static web site qualities, but it’s basically a blog.   Blogs are FREE and easy.  If you’re not so concerned with having your own vanity domain name there are plenty of options here.  In fact I encourage you to set up a blog with one of the free services and play with it regardless of the route you take.

The top two places (IMHO) are:

(1) WordPress.com – They currently have over 5 million blogs.  It’s fairly quick, easy, and a basic account is free.   You might even be able to get something like “myfamilyname.wordpress.com”.   Then again you might not.

(2) Blogger.com – I have no idea how many blogs they have or host.  Blogger is now owned by Google and that’s a good thing.  Again a good cheap/free blog, that IMHO is not as feature rich or as flexible as WordPress but it’s a good place to start.

So with either of these two services you can set up a blog for free, with very little effort.  All you need is an email address for registration.

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Poke around these two sites and see if they meet your needs.  For quick and dirty web based publishing they can’t be beat.   Neither provides you with a lot of storage though more is always available for a small fee.  

You’ll need to link in other services if you want to do heavy multi-media sharing or share a lot of photos.

For photo sharing:

I personally like Picasa, which is part of your Google Account.  You do have a Google account don’t you? 

Other popular photo sharing services like Flickr, webshots, or smugmug may also be used.

But what if you don’t want your site to be:  myfamily.someotherservice.com

What if you want to own myrfamily.com site.  You want it to look like you really know what you’re doing and amaze all your friends and family.

We’ll get to that in the next post (Step 2)