Gadooney.com

Once you’ve registered a domain name and have a Web hosting package set up, the obvious question is, umm, what do you do now? Good question.

As I’ve mentioned before, I highly, highly recommend that you use WordPress when starting out. It’s free, simple to install, and provides you with a browser-based way of publishing content to your site. If your Web host provides WordPress installations for you, you may have it already loaded and ready to go. If not, the WordPress site provides the free download and all sorts of installation instructions to get you up and running.
If you don’t use WordPress or some similar content management system, then you’ll be managing and uploading content to your site the old-fashioned way, creating HTML pages and then uploading them to your site via FTP. Like many old-fashioned ways of doing things, this works extremely well and there’s nothing at all wrong with managing your site this way. The reason I shy away from it is that it means you have to either have a good working knowledge of HTML or are willing to spend the time learning it (which is beyond the scope of what I’m going to cover here).

Many die-hard coders would claim that I’m doing you a disservice by pushing you towards WordPress and enabling you to avoid having to learn HTML. And they’re exactly right. In a perfect world where time is unlimited, we’d not only learn to code HTML by hand in Notepad but also know how to churn butter in case the local grocery store burned down. Unfortunately, in the real world, sometimes we have to cut corners. While it’s optimal to be a HTML guru, you can run a highly successful affiliate website these days with little to no HTML knowledge.

If you’re going for the quick and easy route I’m recommending, all you really need to manage your first website is WordPress and a FTP program to edit permissions on certain files in WordPress, as well as to possibly install WordPress itself to your server. I’m a big fan of FileZilla, which is a free open-source FTP application that is really easy to use. If you already have a FTP client installed, cool, use that one (they’re all pretty similar for what we need them to do), but if you don’t have one at all, I’d go with FileZilla.

And that’s really all you need to get up and running, as far as programs or applications on your end of things to manage your website.