How to Create a Basic Website Like Mine

Several people have asked me how I created my website. The truth is that I have very little knowledge about website development. The short answer is that I created an account with blogger, added a some posts, and that is it! Anyone could do it in just a couple minutes.

For some of the details around my specific website design, let me share the following tools / functions that I used:

1) I used blogger.com to host my website. It is super easy to use.
2) I use a free piece of software at home to manage and view my photos called Picasa. It is a google product, that is also easy to use and allows you to publish photos to the web.
3) I used use PicasaWeb (www.picasaweb.google.com) to host my photos, arrange my photos in an album, and generate html code (to link photo album for an email, or embed photo album or slideshow into a web page).
4) I bought a url through yahoo small business for about $3 a couple years ago. I was able to "mask" my blogger website url with the Laurenzi.org by editing the account preferences.

* Note - you can make your website easy to search for and find by submitting your URL to the index of major search engines by visiting http://www.google.com/addurl/, and https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit, and others.

To someone who wanted to create a website with photos I would recommend that they go ahead and create accounts with Blogger and PicasaWeb. And download the software Picasa (found at www.picasa.com). Picasa will index all of the photos on your computer and display them in a user friendly format. You can select several photos by holding ctrl and clicking on multiple thumbnails. Click on the Web Album button at the bottom of the page. When the photos have uploaded, click View Online. Click on View Album (if you are not already there). In order to embed a slideshow of the photo album into your website, click Embed Slideshow, select Extra Large from the drop down menu, click show captions (you can add captions at Picasa Web), and select Autoplay. Then you can copy and paste the given text into a new post in your blogger account. Your site is all set to publish and view. If you have any questions that you would like to ask me about, just shoot me a note at benlaurenzi@yahoo.com. I'd be glad to give you a hand.