Raise your profile with a personal web page

It used to be true that website creation was the domain of commercial organisations and the more technically-minded computer enthusiast, but times have changed.

There are plenty of affordable and easy-to-use website creation tools on the market today that will guide you through the process of building your own website, even if you have no technical expertise.

What's more, it won't cost you a fortune to have your website hosted, as many ISPs offer free hosting when you sign up to their service and you can purchase your own domain name for just a few pounds each year.

Just because building a website is possible, easy and affordable, it doesn't mean we all need to have one, does it?

Of course not, but there are a number of very good reasons for having your own website, which we will explore here. Read on for inspiration and you could be making your presence felt online in no time.

Personal space
If you've ever delved beyond the first page of results that a search engine returns when you type in a keyword, you'll no doubt have stumbled upon people's personal websites.

Many of these seem to have been created with no aim in mind other than telling the visitor something about the creator. It may include information about hobbies, pets and perhaps a smattering of family photographs.

While these sites might satisfy some people's desire for a modicum of exposure to the world at large, they don't serve much of a purpose.

If you give a little consideration to what you want to achieve with your website before you do anything else, you can use your site to convey a stronger and more useful message to a potentially large audience.

One obvious use for a personal website is to tout your skills to potential employers. If you're looking for a new job you might like to have a copy of your CV online.

It can be hard to fit all the information you want on a paper-based CV when you are need to keep the overall length of the document down. Online, though, you can insert links into the main body of your CV so that the reader can click through to clippings or photos of your work or more detailed information on specific projects on which you have worked.

It would be wise not to rely on this as your sole means of promoting yourself, but it's one more string to add to your bow.

This approach can be particularly useful if you run your own business or work on a freelance basis and are looking to advertise your services to potential clients.

Think of your website as an expanded version of a business card. There's only so much you can put on a small piece of card (the address of your website should certainly be included) but the sky's the limit on the internet.

In addition to telling prospective customers what you can offer them, a website allows you to show them examples of your previous work too: if you're a writer you can include extracts of your published work, if you're a photographer you can include a selection of photographs on your site, and if you're a musician you can provide some sound clips.

Share and share alike
Email is an incredibly handy way to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues around the world but it's not always the best way to share information.

This is particularly true if you want to send a selection of photographs, perhaps of a wedding or party, to lots of people. Granted, it may be fairly simple to send a small selection of photographs to all your friends or relatives in one single email message but what about the recipients?

Those with broadband connections shouldn't have a problem receiving large files as email attachments, but those with a slower connection may not be too happy about it.

In this scenario, you'll probably end up having to send different selections of photos to different people after all. If you have your own website, however, all these problems disappear.

Just upload all the photographs to your website and create an online photo album, then send out an email with details of your website's address and leave to it them to download what they want. What could be easier?

If you don't fancy the idea of setting up and maintaining your own website dedicated to sharing photos, there are plenty of online services available from third parties that allow you to set up a web-based photo album on their sites.

These services have been around for a while and many of them are free, although the amount of space you are allotted to store your photos will vary.

Our Workshop below shows you how to use one of these services, Photobox, but there are many others such as Fotango, Kodak's Ofoto, and those offered by hardware vendors.

The advantages of posting information online to share with friends or family doesn't have to be limited to distributing large files such as photographs with high bandwidth requirements.

If you're travelling abroad you might want to share news of your adventures with those back home. What's the point of diving with sharks if you can't boast about it afterwards?

Certainly you could send out an anonymous group email, but there is a better way. Why not post a travel diary on your website, with digital photographs to illustrate your escapades if you wish, and let people visit your site any time they want an update on the progress of your trip?

Society pages
You needn't merely use your website to keep people up to date with your own personal news. If you are a member of a club, sports team or society, a website can be a very effective way of disseminating information to the rest of the group.

If you help to organise a reading group, for example, you might want to post the titles of the texts you will be discussing, alongside a list of meeting times. You could even include links to online bookstores that sell the texts and add clippings of relevant book reviews.

Including the minutes of previous meetings on your site also means that if a group member misses a meeting, they can still catch up on all the important news.

This is just the start. As you expand your site you could publish a regular newsletter online and you could even start including information for non-members with the aim of interesting them in your club or society. You might just end up gaining some new members from your presence on the internet.

Online team work
If you work from home you probably rely on email to stay in touch with colleagues or clients and to send documents or photos showing the progress of a project back and forth.

A website can also be an important communication medium for people collaborating on a project, both professionally and as part of a leisure project.

Perhaps you're part of a team organising a village gala, a beer festival, an expedition or a sporting event. Instead of inundating each other with emails, each copied to all and sundry, why not let everyone post their contributions on a central project website?

This way you can stay up to date with the progress of different teams or individuals in a couple of clicks of a mouse button.

Maybe you're a keen genealogist. Tracing family history is an increasingly popular activity and if you are working with a relative you've tracked down who lives in Australia, a website can allow you both to work together on your family tree and make it available to other members of the family.

With most websites, one person creates and updates the site and anyone else who uses it just reads what has been posted and, perhaps, downloads files.

If you're using a website for a collaborative project, you'll need to allow more than one person to update the site so you should bear this in mind when you set up the site. This isn't hard to do, so just talk to your hosting service provider or ISP when you sign up to a service.

Store your files
Regular readers of Computeractive will know all about the importance of regularly backing up the data on your hard disk, but it's all too easy to get into bad habits.

There are various reasons for this, probably the most common of which is the perceived hassle involved. But had you thought of backing up small files to a website?

Most hosting providers put limits on the amount of data you can store in this way and, although it doesn't offer a viable alternative for backing up lots of very large files, it is a quick and easy way of protecting your work in progress.

The advantage of using a website for storing data doesn't end with making backups. If you travel regularly but you don't have a laptop, posting documents on your website is an obvious solution, as you'll be able to access the information from a cyber cafe in any city.

Many companies now confirm travel details and the like by email, so you could put digital copies of your itinerary online if you don't just want to rely on the paper originals you'll take with you.

This can be very handy should you lose your documents and need to contact an insurance provider, credit card issuer or airline.

You can apply this to just about any documentation you might need while you're away from home, although it's not a good idea to put any sensitive information on your website unless you protect it from prying eyes using a password.

Get down to business
There's little doubt that having your own website can be extremely useful, but how do you go about building one and how much will it cost you? The good news is that there's no shortage of advice on how to put a website together.

Of course, you'll need some software to help you build and maintain your site. Two of the most competitively-priced products on the market are Mindscape WebCreator at £20 and Macromedia Contribute at £70, both of which are extremely easy to use.

WebCreator caters for the first-time website builder and offers 150 page templates, arranged in categories, which you can adapt for your own site. The drag-and-drop interface is very intuitive so you should be creating new pages in no time.

Contribute, on the other hand, is a site maintenance tool and is particularly useful for setting up a website for collaborative projects, as it allows you to decide who is allowed to edit different parts of the site.

Once you've built your website, you need to find somewhere to host it. To start with we suggest that you use a free hosting service which your current ISP is likely to offer.

Almost all of the most popular ISPs offer free web hosting and, typically, you'll get somewhere between 5Mb and 50Mb of space. For many websites this will be more than enough, although for certain applications - an online photo album for example - you could use up this space very quickly.

After all, with some cameras, a single photograph taken at the highest resolution will occupy around 1Mb.

Your ISP is also likely to impose a limit on the amount of data you can transfer each month. This is calculated by multiplying the size of each page in megabytes by the number of times that page is accessed by different visitors to your site.

The other limitation with the free hosting offered by ISPs is that, in most cases, your address will be something particularly clumsy such as www.myisp.com/homepages/myname rather than www.myname.com.

If you need more web space, a greater data transfer allowance or you want to use your own domain name, you might need to use a paid-for hosting service. Prices vary enormously depending on what you need, so you'd be well advised to shop around.

Note also that if you do want your own domain name, you'll need to register it and renew it each year, which costs from around £15 for a couple of years.

With fewer barriers to building your own website than ever before, now is a great time to make your mark online. You can tailor your site to suit your exact needs, whether you're building a site for a small business or for pleasure. So what's stopping you?

Maintaining your website
Perhaps you already have a website to which you're looking to add new features. You might like to consider adding video or audio clips to your site to present information to visitors in a new format.

If you have a digital camcorder you'll know how to make video clips and many digital stills cameras also offer a movie mode for recording shorter clips.

You can also use some cameras to record audio clips such as an interview or alternatively, if your computer has a sound card, you can create an audio clip using a microphone and the Sound Recorder function in Windows' Accessories menu.

If you've added more pages to your website since you first built it, there's a good chance your site is no longer as easy to navigate as it could be and you should try to reappraise the structure of your site on a regular basis.

Have a good look at the information on your site and create a logical structure that makes it easy for visitors to find the information they need. You should be able to reorganise your site with only the odd change to the links here and there.

Drawing the crowds
If you're using your website to distribute photographs to family and friends or to collaborate on a project, you won't want hoards of people to access the site.

In this case, a simple email stating the web address of your site to the people you want to visit it will suffice. If you are going to measure the success of your site according to how many people visit it, though, you need to find a way of enticing those visitors in.

Depending on the purpose of your website you might print the address on your business card, your letterhead, your club newsletter or even take out an advertisement in a local paper. But you needn't leave it at that.

Many people are directed to websites by search engines, and free services such as that offered by Addme.com allow you to register your site with up to 14 search engines.

Remember, though, that even if you register your site, the results most search engines return are listed according to popularity and your site probably won't show up prominently.

A far better approach is to link your site to others with a similar target audience. If you organise an amateur sports league, for example, you might want to approach your local leisure centre and see if it will display a link to your site on its own website.