Build Your Own Site/Forum Website Building Your Own Website Creating a website is really not that hard, and best of all, you can make one for free. If you have never made a website before, it's not a problem, there's many services out there that are easy to use for beginners. If you know how to use a computer well, chances are, you'll be able to make a website with little problems. First, you need a host, a place that will store your website. I recommend using GeoCities: http://geocities.yahoo.com/. GeoCities is a free service (paid options available also), if you have a Yahoo ID, then you can just login and start working on your free website. If not, simply just create a Yahoo ID for free: http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/learn2/HowItWorks4_Free.html (click on Sign Up). GeoCities has a tool that is easy to use, called PageBuilder. Using PageBuilder, you can easily do many things with your website, and they provide very useful tutorial on how to use it: http://us.geocities.yahoo.com/v/p/t/a.html. Go through the ten steps, and you'll learn all you need to know to start making a website. If you don't like GeoCities, give Angelfire a try: www.angelfire.com. Since you're getting this hosting for free, you'll see ads that are automatically placed on your website. Some features will be limited, and the amount of space and bandwidth (how much your website can be viewed) will also be limited. You get what you pay for, and you're paying nothing with these free services. Even with the limitations, most people are still able to build decent websites. HTML Codes After playing around with a website, you'll learn a website is just "codes," or HTML (the most popular language of websites). With services like GeoCities, offering the PageBuilder, you'll won't see these codes in their true form, however, you can enter your own HTML code. By going to the Add-ons feature in PageBuilder, you can enter your own HTML codes. You can learn more about HTML here: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/ Forum Building Your Own Forum Creating a forum is not difficult at all (probably much easier compared to a website). Again, there's plenty of free options available. I recommend Proboards: http://www.proboards.com/. It's better that you have a good feeling of how to use a forum first before making one yourself, Proboards' Help Guide will show you the basics of what a forum does: http://proboards8.com/help/. Just sign up, and you're ready to go. One important thing to point out when filling out the sign up form, is the Username. The username will be the URL for your forum, like this: USERNAME.proboards.com. When you login, you login with the "admin" as the username, which stands for administrator. Once you signed up and logged in to your forum, you can start making changes to it. The first thing you probably want to do, is to create a board, so posts can actually be made at the forum. All your tools can be found in your Admin panel, for more help on that, go to the Help Guide: http://proboards8.com/help/ Another good service is Invision Free: http://www.invisionfree.com/. Just like free website hosting, you'll be seeing ads on your free forum. However, both Proboards and Invision Free keep their ads at a minimal, so it shouldn't be too intruding. Doing More With That Forum Proboards has a bunch of codes you can insert to your forum that will do a many different things that will change how your forum looks, it's all at Proboards' Support board: http://support.proboards.com/?board=general. Invision Free has a skinning board for help on changing the entire look of your forum: http://invisionfree.com/forums/support/index.php?showforum=46.  
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