Personal web site, do we need one?

Web Designs
and
Hosting

The world is at your Finger Tips.

To have a personal Web Site or not that is a choice only you can make. Why have one? I don't want everyone to know everything about me? The reason to have a personal web site is for the same reason a business would have one for themselves. To Advertise. "To Advertise what" you may ask, I'm not trying to sell myself?

You want to advertise to your family, and friends. You are not out to sell anything but in fact giving it all away. You may want to share pictures, ideas or anything else that you may feel is important to you. We come into this world, we work hard and if we are lucky have a good life while we are here and then we are gone again. This all happens in a very short time when you think about it. We are here a meager 60 to 80 years if all goes well. If you are a rock star, or if you really worked hard, maybe you left something behind other then your children, to remind the world that you were once here. But even things like monuments, buildings etc, all come down one day and then there is nothing left? For those of us that may not have left behind monuments of any kind, what is there left of who we once were. For that fact does it even matter? You never really think about it, as you progress through your life. I can not help but to think of my own past, and that of my parents or grandparents. I know very little about both my parents, and that goes for my own children, they know nothing about their grandparents. Where they come from, or who they were. For that fact who are we? Where do we come from. Our children assume they know a lot about us, also they are at that stage were we are here and if they need to know something they will simply come and ask. But what if we were not here any more, who can they ask?

Does It Matter Who Knows About Us?

This is only one side of this whole idea of a personal web site, there are so many sides. The happy side of it all is, in fact, the main reason I build a site. This is were my children and grandchildren can see just how big this family actually is. We are getting more and more into the split family. As sad as this may seem, it has become a fact of life. Parents sometimes split up. When this happens we sometimes loose touch with one another, and in some cases don't even know how big a family they come from. Who their other parent was. Or if they have any siblings from this separation of their own family?

We live in a society that is far reaching and very distant in many cases. For example I have Children, in Vancouver, Calgary, Sudbury, Chesterville, in Canada and then I have children and grandchildren in London England, and now one of my sons is in China for a short time. As my children grew up they made their own lives and this sometimes means a move to other parts of the country and in some cases to other parts of the world. How can we keep in touch, even in this modern world, with all it's technology? We can send each of them e-mails every so often, with updated pictures, or through the Personal Web Site. This is one place were everyone sees the same thing at the same time. Not only will Brother George in Hong Kong see your pictures but actually even if by chance you lost contact with some of your children or grandchildren, they too may find your site listed on the world wide web if you so choose to.

So what is a personal Web Site? In a very simple term, it is YOU. It is that monument, that you may never build. It is that statue that may never be erected, It is telling everyone, if you want to let know, that you are here and this is who you are. We have the technology to do this with now. Ever wonder where your great, great, great grandparents came from? I would have liked to have known.

So do you need a personal web site? That is totally up to you. Only you can decide that question.

So you want to have a Site of your own?

How do I go about building one.
I really want a web site but I don't know the first thing about Web site building.
Where do I go to place it so everyone I want to see it, will in fact see it?
What will it cost me?

How do you go about building a Web Site? The main thing you have to do is plan. Plan what you want to show on your site. Plan on who is going to see your site. Then plan on what you actually want in your site. We tend to add to much at times, into a web site. We have to not only plan on what we want to show but also how we want to show it. This is a major problem even us professional web site designers run into. We can try adding to much and before you know it, we are re-writing our whole web site. We want to add a million pictures but we don't realize that the more pictures we have on out site the slower our sit will work and in time, no one will want to look at it any more. Not only is the number of pictures we place on our site important, but also the size of the picture. You may wish to take the easy way out and have a professional Web Designer do the work for you, or you may want to tackle the job at hand yourself. For the do it yourselves, be prepared to spend time not only on the planing part but also be prepared to do a lot of research.

You want to build a Web Site. You have done your planing and research. Now you are ready? When we talked about research in the first part, we talked mainly on how to use HTML and maybe a program to build out site with, or just to try and understand a little more of what we are getting into. Also how to change the picture size and to place a picture into the right format ( JPEG ) etc and not bitmap. Now we want to actual go about building a Web Site. There are many ways to go about to building a site. We can use a program to build our site, and there are a lot out there on the market, that will do just that for us. Be prepared to spend a lot of time learning these programs before you start your site. The best way to build your own site and the easiest way is to use a template site. A good example is in Geocities, where you can very easily and with little effort and time on your side build a very nice looking web site with midis and all the other java items you may want.

Now to place your web site so everyone can see it? There are many places that you can go and get web site hosting for free. I will only name 2 here as I could list a few, but the ones I have used are Angelfire.com and Geocities.com Are web sites free on these servers? Yes they are, you are however limited to the amount of space they will give you and they will place ad's on your site. This is what makes them pay for you. You do have another choice and that is to go to a web hosting company and get your site listed with them. The worst part about going to private company is the you should know about, building your own site or using programs like Front Page 2000, or Dreamweaver, etc. These are web design programs and they allow you to design the pages the way you want to, with out the limitations of a template. You are also no longer restricted in space and your bandwidth will increase, but again you are paying for as much as you want and the size you want your site to be. You may find private companies that still will sell you space with template. We however encourage you to design your own site and host with us. We will give you as much help as you may request from time to time.

The price of a Web Site will vary with the amount of space you need. If you have only a small site for your family, and you don't mind the ad's pooping up all the time, when some one looks at your site. If you want a simple template site or, even you can build the site from scratch using html, the a free site maybe the best answer. If you are serious about you web site and you are using your own Domain Name, then you may want to publish your site to a Web Hosting Server like ours. Our prices vary depending on your hosting needs. From your Personal Web Site to a Business Site, large or small we will have a package for your needs.

If you are still not sure that you want a Personal Web Site, then why not give us a call and arrange a personal interview with one of our professionals to see how and in what direction we may be able to help you to understand the need of a web site. There is no cost for a interview, we will give you an hour interview at no charge to you, and we will be totally honest with you and try to get you going in the right direction. Even if it is with a free web site on one of the hosting servers we mentioned already. We want you to enjoy the web site, the you build. Just go to the contact page to contact us or contact us at Cal-Alta.com you ONE STOP DESIGNER and HOST

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