Beginning web development

[Mr. Deleted]

I have been wanting to write about domain names for a while, and I have a week off from college (until Tuesday), so I wanted to use this time to post this.

First, with domain parking down, development is the way to go, and you can always redirect a domain name and for some purposes, that is OK, but as the owners of WhiteTrash.com found out, that was not the best policy. They had the facebook URL, fb.com/whitetrash where they also were forwarding the domain name to, and had over a million likes, when out of the blue, they had 0 likes, and whenever anyone tried to share anything from the page, share the page itself, or the domain name, Facebook censors said it was spam. Facebook had, for all intents and purposes shut the site down, though it was not in violation of any rules that I am aware of.

Point being, while you can grow a major social media presence, it is ALWAYS good to have a site of your own where you can get email addresses or to use push notifications to notify users of new content. Without it, you are relying on the network to always be there, even though you know they can turn on you a moments notice.

So what do you need to start developing a domain name?

Hosting

I currently use Hostgator's Reseller Hosting for this, so when I want to make a new website, first I set the DNS to my hosting service (you can do this part after you create the account or before, but it is probably going to take a while before the DNS is going to propagate), I just log into my WHM, and start a new site. I then go back to the cPanel, and go to the account I want to create



Next step find the Quick Install software,


Next install Wordpress

 

[Mr. Deleted]

Next you click to install and it will give you this message on top:

 

[MikeinFlorida]

Mr. Deleted has it! Use wordpress. It's the state of the art currently. A lot of huge sites use it.

 

[RobM]

Always disagree with this. Wordpress is bloated, insecure, slow, and 'usual'. Sites worth money and making money use their own bespoke (and paid for) solutions. Work out where you want to be in life but the old adage 'you need to spend money to make money' still holds true.

 

[Mr. Deleted]

Always disagree with this. Wordpress is bloated, insecure, slow, and 'usual'. Sites worth money and making money use their own bespoke (and paid for) solutions. Work out where you want to be in life but the old adage 'you need to spend money to make money' still holds true.

Yes, I agree, but this is more for beginners to get their feet wet, so to speak, not as a permanent solution for most sites. I have had so many hacking issues with WP, but I only use it for a low-cost site, not for an important site. Once a site outgrows WP I move it to another solution.

 

[Castion]

Always disagree with this. Wordpress is bloated, insecure, slow, and 'usual'. Sites worth money and making money use their own bespoke (and paid for) solutions. Work out where you want to be in life but the old adage 'you need to spend money to make money' still holds true.

Although I do agree to some degree Some big sites (that are most certainly worth money) do use WP:

1. TechCrunch.
2. The New Yorker.
3. BBC America.
4. Bloomberg Professional.
5. The Official Star Wars Blog.
6. Variety.
7. Sony Music.
8. MTV News.

https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/40-most-notable-big-name-brands-that-are-using-wordpress/

Many of them are just blogs.. But there are some notable exceptions:
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/

 

[Mr. Deleted]

WP can be a great beginner site, but the question is how do you stop the people from injecting spam pages into a WP site like they did for PHPBB forums in the past? I used to use PHPBB a lot, but when they kept getting hacked, I abandoned it. Now the latest was when a client's real estate site on WP ended up getting an email saying there was malware on it.

 

[Castion]

To me that sounds like you were using an unsafe plugin. Maybe something flash based?

 

[Mr. Deleted]

I dont (currently) use any flash on my sites, but not really sure about his site. His is a site with https; its a shopping cart for buying real estate.

 

[Mr. Deleted]

He did have a lot of old plugins that I did not leave in after I remade the site.

 

[DMaN]

Look, the biggest problem with Wordpress websites is a tie between out-of-date software (core & plugins) and plain insecure plugins. There are some excellent security tools out there that can be employed by a reasonably knowledgeable person that can combat the injection attacks. I've also found that larger shared providers tend to have so many Wordpress (and other software) installations that often an insecure site elsewhere is exploited, and the code simply injected from there. Often the environment is not optimally configured as well.

Any time a piece of software is widely used, it will be targeted.

Wordpress is not the end-all, be-all solution for everything, but it's a great platform to use for the less technically inclined to be able to get up and running, which I think you are driving at Mr. Deleted. It can also be favorably used by more seasoned developers. That's a pretty versatile tool, but like anything, it can be short circuited.

 

[esmoka]

If you are using WP, the first plugin you need is a security plugin. That's not an option, I learned this the hard way. I have used Wordfence and Cerber personally and like Cerber better as it has more options for the free version than Wordfence does. Wordfence is too "fremium", if you know what I mean. I also like that you can quickly have Cerber install reCAPTCHA on your comment and login forms. This means you save yourself from installing yet another plugin (not to mention all the reCAPTCHA plugins I have tried suck or are very limited, IMHO).

As far as themes are concerned, you can use any of the included WP themes, but I personally use and love Generatepress. It's very lightweight and the free version is good enough for most newbs. And very importantly, they actually do update their theme and keep up with security. It's not maintained by some guy in his jammies living in his mom's basement who merely develops themes to get a rise every time someone downloads them lol. I trust Generatepress (in terms of updating) more than the WP themes.

 

[lucaswilliam123]

this is more for beginners to get their feet wet, so to speak, not as a permanent solution for most sites. I have had so many hacking issues with WP, but I only use it for a low-cost site, not for an important site. Once a site outgrows WP I move it to another solution. this is more for beginners to get their feet wet, so to speak, not as a permanent solution for most sites. I have had so many hacking issues with WP, but I only use it for a low-cost site, not for an important site. Once a site outgrows WP I move it to another solution.