Types of Websites

Let the Games Begin!

For photo sharing on the web, a quick search of that term in google will reveal plenty of options for you. The biggest ones of the past couple years have been deviantArt, photobucket and Flickr. Continuing to slowly but surely take over the world, google has also entered the photo sharing community with it’s new service, Picasa. So how do you pick one amongst these juggernauts? Features features features. Do some research on them and find out which one suits your needs best. When you're talking about photos though, the biggest factor is of course disk space because high resolution, otherwise known as big good looking pictures, take up a lot of space. So the more space the better. Finally, take a look at how the pictures are presented too. Do they do something attractive with your pictures and embed them into a web slideshow, or do they just have thumbnails and let people click on them?

Blogging also avails itself to many options on the web. The two most popular are probably Blogger and WordPress. Most times when you get started, the website will ask you to pick a design template which is how your webpage will look. This is basically just choosing between different design layouts. Both are free services and both will satisfy your blogging needs to be sure. In this realm, one service isn't all that different from another for the most part so you're just going to have to see what strikes your fancy which again is usually how they will display your blog.

Social networking, as previously stated is the hottest thing on the web right now and there are many sites really trying to exploit that fact. Unless you've been living under a rock lately you've heard of the top three: Friendster, Facebook and MySpace. Currently, Facebook's community is mostly college based, that's to say that most of it's users find each other based on what school they're attending and most of the people on there are the young college types. They have however apparently opened up their site for everyone now. Friendster and MySpace on the other hand have a wide and diverse community. In the last year, MySpace has surged way infront of Friendster, thanks mostly to it's "top 8 friends" layout and it's flexibility to let users add pretty much whatever content they wish making it HIGHLY customizable. Friendster has been trying to catch up ever since and despite a cleaner layout and faster load times, MySpace just won't loosen it's grip.


Last but not least, if you need a commercial site on the web, there are also plenty of places to choose from, but unfortunately it won't be as easy as the other types of sites. Not to go into much detail here, (since we could easily spend 5 pages talking about this), when you have a commercial site, there are often things that you need that you won’t get for free. Most notably, a www.yourname.com URL. After that, what about the content for the site? If you need things to look professional, you may have to employ the talents of a web designer, and if you need custom solutions for databasing, search forms, shopping carts, or any many other things, you're going to have to learn to program or hire someone who knows it themselves. However, if you’re ready to get down and dirty there are some super cheap solutions that you can try without having to employ a webshop, (which is a company that makes and runs websites). Go Daddy, GeoCities, and Yahoo, (to name a few), all offer services (free and otherwise), to get you started. What these sites, you'll have the ability to upload files of any kind to your webspace including your very own html files. When you can add your own files to your webspace, you have the ultimate flexibility in your site.

In Conclusion

Your options on the web are as varied as the things you can do on it. Hopefully you've learned that no matter what you want to accomplish, you can do it, and in most cases for free and without any knowledge of computer or web programming. So what are you waiting for? Get started!

Now that you've decided what kind of website you're going to have, learn about
Registering a Domain Name for it in our next article!

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