Creating a website

My friend T and I have decided to create a website.

Sounds easy yeah?

That's what I thought too until I launched into the actual process of doing it. Sweet Holy Moly! Who'd have thunk that there are a gazillion different choices every step of the way? I'm a bit overwhelmed. And I'm embarrassed to admit that despite having been a techie, I still feel fairly clueless about the whole process. Maybe I've been a non-techie for too long (5 years now!)

The way I see it, here are the broad steps I need to accomplish:

0) Concept - Work in Progress

1) Register domain - Done!

I did all of 5 minutes of research and finally went with GoDaddy (perhaps it was those Superbowl ads! I'm quite impressionable). I have registered the domain name for 5 years at only $3.99 a year! I think that's a pretty nice deal. Not sure if I should have taken 10 years since the incremental is only $20.

2) Site hosting - Done!

Perhaps I should have done a bit more research on this, but I figured I would try out GoDaddy's basic hosting plan (on Linux) for a year and if that isn't adequate, I will switch with the benefit of knowledge gained over the next year. It cost me just $48, so I'm pretty sure that switch will happen at some point, maybe even sooner than I plan.

3) Content - Work in Progress

We have had one fairly productive brainstorming session so far which has yielded a broad outline of topics and content we intend to include on the site. It's going to be interesting to see how we are able to generate content with both of us working on this just a few hours a week.

4) Design look and feel - TBD

T is an executive producer at a media firm, so we're hoping she can rope in one of her creative friends to do some free graphics for us and help us out with the look and feel.

5) Implement - TBD

The implementation is the most challenging part. Back in my techie avatar, I mostly used MS Visual Studio on Windows to do all my programming, most of which was middle and back-end coding. Unfortunately, I currently don't own any copies of Visual Studio and even if I did, I am tripped up by the fact that my husband is an Apple-head and has Mac'ified our entire apartment. So, I'm currently researching the following:

(a) Software that runs on the Mac that can be used for building websites. I have been playing around with iWeb which does a damn decent job, but I'm not sure how well it will hold out for creating more robust functionality

(b) We intend to host a message board on our website, and would like to license third party software to run on our server, but honestly I have no clue how.

(c) I have been using Classic FTP to upload files to the host, but not very happy with it so far. It hangs too frequently and takes way too long to sync files unless I do them directory-by-directory. Looking back at the link above, I wonder why I didn't read the reviews before downloading. It seems obvious that it's a sh*tty product.

Laying out these steps on paper (!) feels good even though I'm pretty clear about it in my head. I'm very excited about this venture! It gives me something intellectually challenging to do - much as a love my son, there are moments when I miss the brain-workout and adult-interaction aspects of my job. More importantly, I love it that I'm doing this with T who is one of my closest friends and really fun to work with.

I will aim to detail our progress as we move through the process. Any helpful tips are greatly appreciated (am not sure why I end all my posts soliciting feedback when I am pretty sure I have 0 readers right now :-)).