3 Steps to Creating a Website without Coding for less than $100

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Hello friends,

I’m writing this post today, which I’m hoping would be helpful to both technical and non-technical people.

Like any technology, it always magical and mysterious and shrouded in acronyms that some people who may need to use it, tend to shy away from it because of how mystical it all seems.

Before becoming an InfoSec professional, I was just a broke guy who needed a website, since I was broke, I had to find a creative way to get a reliable website up, with little money, and that trick has served me very well.

Now I want to share that trick with all of you, incase there is someone out there that really needs a website, but doesn’t have the know-how or a Jazillion dollars to hire developers.
Lets do this.

// Step One : Creating The Site.

If you have a gmail, you have a website. Years ago, Google bought the site Blogger, and I know what you’re thinking “You said you were going to show us how to create a Website, not a blog”, and you are correct, but stay with me, it will all make sense.

There is a few advantages to using Blogger:
ONE:
You can use Blogger as a Website! yes you read that right, here are a couple of examples: AshNoor.me & Kernano.com both of these are made with Blogger, yet not being used as a blog.
Trick here is to make sure to set up “Pages”, which would give you that top menu for “Home, Project, Contact”, ect.

TWO:
If you wanted, you can also use it AS a blog, a 2-in-1 if you like. This could be ideal if your a band, and artist, a writer, heck or even a blogger.

THREE:
The Blogger platform has a lot of free add-ons, so you can have your twitter feed on the side. If you have a YouTube channel, you can actually embed the videos into the page(s). If your a musician, you can embed you Bandcamp player into it as well.

Are you starting to see it now?
There are many combinations that you can do to make it look and feel which ever way you want.

By this point, you have a nice, specialized blog, your URL will look something like this (blogspot . YourBlogName . com), lets change that so that it would (Yoursite . come) instead.

// Step Two: Buying A Domain.

This is the only (Paid) portion of the processes. There are multiple places you can do this, I would recommend choosing one place that you like, get familiar with their settings, that way when you do end up creating other sites, you will be able to turn them into live sites in a matter of minutes.

I like Domain.com their prices are good, they have many different “.Names”, so you can choose the one that best fits you, and some are a lot cheaper then others, and you can set it to automatic renewal so you won’t forget it every 2 years or what not.

And yes, you can buy a domain for less than $100, you might even find some that are about $20 (per year). Once you buy your cool new website name, don’t log out just yet, go to the 3rd and final step.

// Step Three: Linking your Blog to your Website name.

Once you bought your domain, you need to do just 2 things:
Thing ONE:
Have the domain name be forwarded to your blog.

Thing TWO:
Turn on what they call “Stealth URL”, other domain sellers may call it “URL Masking” or something like that.

What that does is hide your blogger URL, so that when people type (Yoursite . com), in the browser bar, when it goes to your site it will still say (Yoursite . com), instead of (blogspot . YourBlogName . com).

// You now have a site.

That’s it, your done. The cool thing about this is that anytime you need to make changes to your ‘site’, you just log into your blogger account, make your changes, hit “update”, and it automatically updates on the front end.

An advantage of having a website is to have a central hub of everything YOU do. That way you can just send people to your site for everything, and if you need to send them to external links, you can do it from there.

I write multiple blogs here on medium, as well create little python tools, so anytime it comes up during conversation and someone is interested in learning more about either, I just say “Go to my site AshNoor.me” , from there they can either go to my “Blogs” page or my “Projects” page which would send them to where they need to go. It will make your life a lot easier, and a bit more professional in my humble opinion.

I hope that was helpful.
Go (ethically) Hack The Planet.
[R/F]