You can easily create a professional-looking website with nothing more than an ordinary computer and some raw ambition. Want to build a blog, sell products, create forums, or promote an event? No problem! This friendly, jargon-free book gives you the techniques, tools, and advice you need to build a site and get it up on the Web. The important stuff you need to know: Master the basics. Learn HTML5, the language of the Web. Design good-looking pages. Use styles to build polished layouts. Get it online. Find a reliable web host and pick a good web address. Use time-saving tools. Learn free tools for creating web pages and tracking your visitors. Attract visitors. Make sure people can find your site through popular search engines like Google. Build a community. Encourage repeat visits with social media. Bring in the cash. Host Google ads, sell Amazon’s wares, or push your own products that people can buy via PayPal. Add pizzazz. Include audio, video, interactive menus, and a pinch of JavaScript.

Provides information on creating a Web site, covering such topics as text elements, style sheets, graphics, attracting visitors, JavaScript, and blogs.

WordPress can hold everything from a simple blog to a full-blown, dynamic website, but the program's rich feature set can be difficult to master. This jargon-free book walks through the process of creating a WordPress site, from beginners to experienced WordPress users.

Think you have to be a technical wizard to build a great web site? Think again. For anyone who wants to create an engaging web site--for either personal or business purposes--Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual demystifies the process and provides tools, techniques, and expert guidance for developing a professional and reliable web presence. Like every Missing Manual, you can count on Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual to be entertaining and insightful and complete with all the vital information, clear-headed advice, and detailed instructions you need to master the task at hand. Author Matthew MacDonald teaches you the fundamentals of creating, maintaining, and updating an effective, attractive, and visitor-friendly web site--from scratch or from an existing site that's a little too simple or flat for your liking. Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual doesn't only cover how to create a well-designed, appealing, smart web site that is thoroughly up to date and brimming with the latest features. It also covers why it's worth the effort by explaining the rationale for creating a site in the first place and discussing what makes a given web site particularly aesthetic, dynamic, and powerful. It further helps you determine your needs and goals and make well informed design and content decisions. Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual includes a basic primer on HTML, working with JavaScript, and incorporating services like Paypal's shopping cart, Amazon's associate program, and Google AdSense and AdWords. It delivers advanced tricks for formatting, graphics, audio and video, as well as Flash animation and dynamic content. And you'll learn how to identify and connect with your site's audience through forms, forums, meta tags, and search engines. This isn't just another dry, uninspired book on how to create a web site. Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual is a witty and intelligent guide for all of you who are ready to make your ideas and vision a web reality.

Bestselling author MacDonald shows readers how to best use HTML5's new features to create an effective Web experience for visitors.

Think you have to be a technical wizard to build a great web site? Think again. If you want to create an engaging web site, this thoroughly revised, completely updated edition of Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual demystifies the process and provides tools, techniques, and expert guidance for developing a professional and reliable web presence. Whether you want to build a personal web site, an e-commerce site, a blog, or a web site for a specific occasion or promotion, this book gives you detailed instructions and clear-headed advice for: Everything from planning to launching. From picking and buying a domain name, choosing a Web hosting firm, building your site, and uploading the files to a web server, this book teaches you the nitty-gritty of creating your home on the Web. Ready-to-use building blocks. Creating your own web site doesn't mean you have to build everything from scratch. You'll learn how to incorporate loads of pre-built and freely available tools like interactive menus, PayPal shopping carts, Google ads, and Google Analytics. The modern Web. Today's best looking sites use powerful tools like Cascading Style Sheets (for sophisticated page layout), JavaScript (for rollover buttons and cascading menus), and video. This book doesn't treat these topics as fancy frills. From step one, you'll learn easy ways to create a powerful site with these tools. Blogs. Learn the basics behind the Web's most popular form of self-expression. And take a step-by-step tour through Blogger, the Google-run blogging service that will have you blogging before you close this book. This isn't just another dry, uninspired book on how to create a web site. Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual is a witty and intelligent guide you need to make your ideas and vision a web reality.

If you can build websites with CSS and JavaScript, this book takes you to the next level—creating dynamic, database-driven websites with PHP and MySQL. Learn how to build a database, manage your content, and interact with users. With step-by-step tutorials, this completely revised edition gets you started with expanded coverage of the basics and takes you deeper into the world of server-side programming. The important stuff you need to know: Get up to speed quickly. Learn how to install PHP and MySQL, and get them running on both your computer and a remote server. Gain new techniques. Take advantage of the all-new chapter on integrating PHP with HTML web pages. Manage your content. Use the file system to access user data, including images and other binary files. Make it dynamic. Create pages that change with each new viewing. Build a good database. Use MySQL to store user information and other data. Keep your site working. Master the tools for fixing things that go wrong. Control operations. Create an administrative interface to oversee your site.