Resources
The need for websites, graphics, and videos are everywhere now, but if you don’t know how to do it, it can be very troubling and even expensive to get it done.
In reality, there are many resources out there that can help you get these things done, and they’re not really that hard at all. However, you do need TIME to learn them, and some of us just don’t have the time to learn!
Here are some resources so that you can get some web/media design done yourself if you do have the time. This will save you a lot of time trying to find these resources! This section is mainly for beginners, if you’re a pro trying to find more, sorry, I don’t have any right now. I might put some more advanced stuff as times goes on.
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Web Design/Development:
Free Websites
If you are looking to make a free website yourself, there are many free hosts out there for you to use. Google and other other various companies provides these services. The downside is that there is little flexibility and very little technical support is usually offered. Also, some of these services will place advertisements on your website to earn revenue. The templates are also usually not customized, or easily customizable.
Some sites that offer free services are:
http://www.webs.com
http://sites.google.com
http://www.bravenet.com/webhosting/
Out of the above sites, Google is the only one without advertisements, but has a limited selection of templates and formats.
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Layouts
Using layouts requires you to know some html, you can find templates and layouts online for you to download and put on your site. You will need hosting before you can do this. You can find some free layouts here:
http://www.freewebtemplates.com
Remember that the most fancy looking layout is not neccessarily the best one for you, espcially if you want a profesional image. The new trends, web 2.0 is all about simplicity and cleaness, while at the same time, gives a professional feel.
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Free Hosting
Free hosting will give you your very own space on the internet, it’s much like the free websites but most of them will not help you set up your site using a site builder. You will have to find an template and know html to use it properly. By getting a free host, you will most likely get a subdomain like www.yoursite.freehostsite.com.
Free hosts will also have limited features and will have very little technical support if it ever breaks down, they are more likely to be down as well because they won’t have paying customers complaining.
I will offer free hosting under my domain, just contact me about it. This will probably be more secure than other free hosting in terms of down-time since this is a paid hosting. You will get a sub-domain and a ftp account to upload your files.
Here is a list of some commercialized free hosting:
http://www.free-webhosts.com/webhosting-01.php
Remember that even when free hosts offer subdomains for free, you can also buy top level domains, such as www.yoursite.com separately.You can do so here: http://www.active-domain.com
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Paid Hosting
If you need to get your own website with your own domain name like www.yoursitename.com, you will most likely need some paid hosting. Paid hosting are usually a good option because they’re not very expensive, and at the same time, gives you more technical support, less limits, and an overall more secure and professional site. It’s a better option if you’re serious about your site.
My site is hosted by Hosting PaPa. I think it’s a great and very easy to use host, the setup process is great, it’s cheap, it has many features (including credits for online marketing), and you get a domain FOR LIFE! It also only uses green energy to boot! I chose it because it was ranked the highest web host by a very credible review website.
I will add more hosting options as time goes on.
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Graphic Design/Image Editing
Graphic design and image editing can usually be done on an image editing software such as photoshop. Photoshop cost a lot of money commercially, but usually schools already bought licenses for students to use. You can try looking in computer labs for these programs.
There is a program called GIMP, this is just like photoshop without some of its more advanced features. In my opinion, even though it’s not as good as photoshop, it’s very good for a FREE software! You can download it HERE.
Learning the basics of these programs only require time to figure what each buttons do. If you want to learn more advanced techniques you might need to read some books for search up some tutorials.
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Video Editing
Basic video editing can be done on any video editing software, and they’re easy to use. The easiest one is windows movie maker on windows, and iMovie on the mac. They all come with the operating system so you don’t have to buy them. More advanced software like Adobe Premere and Adobe Aftereffects can produce better special effects, but they do cost money.
The basics of making a movie is mainly just opening the video file on the video editor, then dragging each video into a timeline. You’re allowed to cut each video into different chuncks and add audio to the timeline as well, overlapping with the video if you want to.
I will try to get a simple video of video editing here in the future.
