Hi Rick,
I am looking to set up a website that I hope may become a commercial success!
To start with I need to be able to put up a fair amount of text and pictures maybe even some music and video clips.
I will want other people to be able to submit their text and clips, pics etc too.
I would like to be able to generate lots of traffic and make some money from ads etc.
Is there any host site that you would recommend me to set up with – somewhere that will not be expensive to start with, but will be able to cope if things get busy and it is a commercial success? I have a domain name reserved to operate under at freeparking.
Hope you can help.
regards
Charlie

Hi Charlie, good to hear from you. I often have people ask me how to make your own website, so I thought it was very blogworthy! So here is my advice on how to make your own website.

To build a search engine friendly site I would build a Wordpress Blog which is exactly what this is, although this does look like a blog it doesn't have to.  For example I did a site for Jon Nicholls (of Mixed Feelings fame) called Hampstead Pals. The main site is made using Wordpress 'pages' and the 'news items' are made with Wordpress 'posts'. Wordpress is very cool for making an interactive site that is easy to update and grow. The beauty of blogs is that they have an RSS Feed which means that you can set your blog up to automatically ping the blog search engines (which includes Google). You can also 'burn' your feed with Feedburner which puts it into the heart of Google and Google Blogsearch – more about that later.

As far as hosting goes I am rating this company  eUKHost
They have a thing called CPanel which makes it very easy to set up sites very quickly. There is also have a feature called Fantastico which you can use to install Wordpress in about 30 seconds. There packages are very cheap, but totally expandable. They also have a 24/7 live chat facility for support which is just brilliant.

If you are expecting more US traffic than UK then I'd host in the US in which case HostGator offer a very similar service (and their servers are wind powered in Texas!) – my experince with them has been very good too.

So here's a step by step of what to do:

How to make your own website

• Get some hosting, just pick the cheapest Linux Hosting plan

• Go to your domain people and set the Nameservers to ns58.eukdns.com and ns59.eukdns.com – this will point your domain at your hosting at eUKHost.

• login to CPanel at EUKHost and scroll down to Fantastico and install a Wordpress Blog

• Customize your Wordpress blog by adding a theme (there are loads of free Wordpress Themes but I am a massive fan of Semiologic, which you have to buy, but really does help attract traffic and has very good support. Some people also like Wordpress Dream Themes which are very attractive, but I have found a bit fiddly to customize – however you can get 'The Internet Genius', Ben Cope to do a free customization for you when you buy this theme. To load a new theme you will need to set up an FTP account using cPanel – but the support people can help you do that

• Automate your pinging: This is a recommended ping list for a WordPress blog. Every time you post these services will be notified of your blog post increasing your online exposure.  To use this list, copy and paste this list to your Settings->Writing tab in the admin panel. It's worth searching for 'wordpress ping list 2009' to get an up to date ping list as these services do change over time.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

• Set your permalinks to make the structure more friendly: Go to settings>permalinks and pick the second option 'Day and Name' ie this one is 'http://www.ricklomas.com/2009/03/12/sample-post/'

• To get indexed by Google quickly get a Google Account and Go to the Google Webmaster Tools and add your site, verify it and then add a site map. Wordpress can create XML site maps automatically.

• Go to Google Analytics and add the code to your Wordpress blog, that way you can track market trends and traffic easily.

• Go to Feedburner.com and burn your feed, in your case tick the box for 'I am podcaster' – if you are not now, you will be

• Go to Technorati.com and register your site there

• Look at some of the Howie Schwartz products such as Conversation Domination to learn how to do Keyword Research properly (and free!) and then build web 2.0 properties to link to your site and get you traffic. If you wanna get dirty and get a little bit more aggressive than have a look at Black Hat is Back which is just awesome.

Please leave comments below if you need more help.