Claude's step by step advice about registering a domain name

Every business needs a website and nearly every professional person needs a web presence. If you are online, using Insta, TikTok, whatever, you have an online presence. But there's a difference between an online presence and a professional online presence. You want to make sure there's nothing damaging on your social media trail, but you also want to start building a professional online presence and a website is the best way to do this. While there are Site-In-A-Box services on which one can host a portfolio, I want you to spend some time learning outside your comfort zone. (If you already know HTML/CSS, push yourself to learn more. If you don't know anything yet, good.)

Learning entirely new things can be intimidating. Tech companies know this and so they do everything they can to flatten the learning curve when it comes to using their product. But learning isn't about taking the easy way. Learning is about taking the hard way. Fortunately, the hard way doesn't cost any money. As in all things in life, you can spend money or you can spend time.

You can get a free web hosting account at spaces.w3schools.com (link below). The free version has some limitations. For one thing, while you can create new files and upload your existing files, you cannot rename a file once it is up there, nor can you move one. This inconvenience is designed to make you want to pay $5.00 a month for a better service. You don't have to do that, although you can if you like.

And you may want to because the free version also has a 20 MB cap on file space, which means that all of the files for your portfolio can't add up to more than 20MB. If you have a lot of photographs and especially if you have video, this will quickly become a problem. You may want to compress an image before uploading it. You can do this with software you already have, perhaps, or a free site like Optimizilla. There are others. Remember that "free" is a marketing tool, not necessarily a real adjective. So be mindful. For videos, you can use your website as a jumping off point to other services, like Youtube.

The next weeks are all about following directions, paying close attention, and not getting distracted. Basically you will be copy, pasting, and editing. You need to learn enough HTML and CSS to edit a website template. Be systematic. Make one change, save, check, undo or continue depending on how the change worked.

1. Always read before you click.
2. Start by reading this
3. HTML Introduction. Your goal is to get comfortable reading HTML labels and understanding how they work. You don't need to learn them all. But you should recognize and now how to write the basics: anchors (links), images, headings, lists, and basic text stuff like paragraphs, italics, bold face. You might like to ask an AI, "What are the 20 most common HTML tags.
4. Next, read How TO - Create a Free Website.
   1. Don't click on anything until you have read over the whole screen. Once you have, scroll back to the top and click on the green button that says Get Started for Free.
   2. Once you have setup an account, read the README file. Notice that you already have a file called index.html. Any content (words and HTML) you put in that file is what a person will see when they go to your URL. My URL, for example, is https://gpullman.w3spaces.com/.
   3. Click on How TO - Make a Website, scroll down to the green bar that says Try it Yourself, and then copy and paste all the code on the left of the screen into your index.html file.
   4. Save it.
   5. When you go to your url, you should see this. If so, great start! If not, retrace your steps.
   6. You might find this this overview helpful.

Here are 4 sub how-tos you should review:

1. Page title
2. File paths
3. Links
4. Images
   If you are a photographer, you should also look at all the image options ()

HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language, is used to label the parts of a digital document, the body, the headings, the paragraphs, etc. CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, is used to alter how the HTML parts appear on the screen. CSS is a lot to learn. You should learn one or two elements a day.