My first website, a single page at www.ankersfamily.org, was intended as a way for friends who had lost touch as we moved around to find us. It was a very simple affair: a picture of us, a sentence saying who we are and an email contact address, which was hand built in HTML. The current family website does not have much more content but was built more easily, although still with more trial and error than should have been necessary.
A couple of years ago I was playing email Diplomacy a lot so was thinking of hosting a couple of games on my own site. Rather than hand build each page I bought a copy of Microsft Frontpage, it took a bit of trial and error to the get the settings aligned with those of my host but soon I had things running smoothly, it was certainly a lot easier than HTML. When I stopped Diplomacy, because it was taking too much time, I took the site down leaving only simple welcome pages.
Now, here I am again looking to update a website on a regular basis. So, am I using Frontpage again? No, because I now do most of my home computing on a Mac I have bought a copy of iWeb. It is broadly similar to Frontpage in that it allows you to build web sites using a WYSIWYG environment, save & test them on your local drive then FTP to a web host. iWeb defaults to posting to Apple’s MobileMe service but easily switches to any host, well sort of. It may be my stupidity, it may be my host, it may be iWeb but it has been another bout of trial and error to get things uploading smoothly. Finally, everything is working.
Well, almost everything, I wanted to try hosting my individual site at MobileMe instead of my main webhost. In theory that should be possible but so far, I cannot get it working. The help files have not helped so I feel a period of waiting on a help-line is imminent.
Update 20/April: it turns out that some of my difficulties getting the site set up were due to a bug at my host and others due to delays in changes on the admin page propagating to the servers. I have not yet tackled the problem of pointing my external domain to MobileMe.