Level 1
Now that we have a one page website we need to broadcast it live. To broadcast it we need a host. A host is a company that stores your webfiles, such as webpages, on a server and deploys it to the internet. This makes it viewable by any browser connected to the internet. There are many options for hosting a website:
Ask yourself:
For level #1:
Now that we have our design parameters we can build the first page.
Web hosting is one of the necessary beginner steps in having a working website but unfortunately not well understood and overly complex for many people. What's worse is that companies that bundle services to make websites setup quickly to handle the technical aspects leave users with underpowered or underperforming sites, often with expensive vendor lock in. Since this is a beginner series we can narrow down the 7 main types of web hosting into 2 broad types: Static and Dynamic.
A static site serves the same page to every viewer regardless of who they are. Common use cases for static sites is html blogs where the content is static, meaning never changing, until the uploads or administrator, usually the domain owner and operator of the site, updates files manually. Smaller sites can have security,dns, and other features managed by provider.
A dynamic site changes what you see based on cookies, clicks, region, or other behavior. A dynamically hosted site alters content based on user interactions. Shopping sites that shoow personlized product lists are one example of dynamic hosting. Medium or larger sites will usually require some networking or security knowledge and have trained staff in-house to monitor, repair, or change network settings.
Static hosting is simpler to set up so that is what is going to be used at this level. Our choices for static hosts comed down to paid or free. As a learning class we will choose free. The easiest of these is Neocities, which strives for a nostalgic 1999 Geocities aesthetic. Geocities was a popular free online community much like social media is today, but more decentralized.
Yahoo! communities was another earlier example of user created content but was more like Reddit in that it had user created groups and people would message each other more directly. The a good comparision would be framing the original Myspace as a good midway transition between Geocites as personal blogspaces, and Instagram as massive marketing social media and user streamed content providers.