Website Building Options

You have registered your domain name now, want to build a website, but are not sure of how to proceed. With Register4Less.com, you have several options, and we’ll lay these out below.

R4L Free Hosting Platform

On most accounts with us, we provide you with 10 MB of space for hosting a site free with your domain registration. The free hosting platform is perfect if you’re building a small personal or business site, and have some experience with HTML and CSS, and potentially Javascript.  The free hosting platform does not support databases like MySQL or server side scripting languages like PHP, Python, or Perl, but does support Javascript.
The best way to connect with the server to publish your site, whether directly from the program you are using or from an FTP program like FileZilla is to use the FTP service.  Please see this page on R4L’s help Wiki for instructions.

Build a Template-Based Site

Many websites provide templates you can use to help you kickstart the design and layout of your website. Enter in “Website Template” into your favourite search engine and you’ll see lots of results. While some sites charge for these, there are plenty of free options out there as well. Developing from an existing template is best if you have some HTML, image editing (Photoshop or The Gimp) and CSS experience.

R4L Advanced Hosting Platform

The AHS paid hosting platform provides more advanced features and options, and opens up more options for developing your website.  The AHS platform provides full web logging abilities, support for databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, and server side scripting languages like PHP, Python and Perl, and even allow you to run an e-commerce website.  Hosting packages on this platform start at $1.45/month (billed annually), and feature a 30-day no-questions money back guarantee.

While most of our plans bundle email hosting with web hosting, there are plans for email-only and web hosting only if you prefer.  Please see this page for descriptions of our plans and pricing.

This platform provides the cPanel interface to manage your hosting services, one-click software installation, server logs, and more.  Once you have a plan setup, you connect to the cPanel by logging in to manage your domain and connect to Paid Hosting > Manage Advanced Hosting.

WYSIWYG Website Builder on the Server

R4L provides a WYSIWYG tool called Site Publisher  pre-installed on your cPanel.  To use this template based builder, simply connect to your cPanel and look for the SitePublisher icon in the Domains section of the cPanel interface.  You’ll choose a base template to go from, and then work with the editor to customize the text and upload your images.

CMS (Content Management System) Environments

Content Management Systems are great for sites that are going to be updated regularly. The CMS provides you with a front-end system that allows you to log in and manage the content of your website, essentially allowing you to build and maintain the site without the need for knowing HTML, PHP and CSS (though these are highly desirable if you’re going to build a more complex site. Our most popular by far CMS tool is WordPress, though other platforms like Joomla and Drupal are also supported. To install a CMS environment, go to the cPanel, and look for the Softaculous icon. You’ll find these, and hundreds of other different packages that are supported for your website.

Hand Coded

Last but not least, is the option to develop your website using custom HTML, scripting and database code. While this is by far the most technically challenging way to develop a site, it does have the advantage of giving you complete control over all of your scripting code, database code, and HTMLand CSS files. Recommended only for advanced users, and those with the desire to learn website development at its core. Who knows, maybe you’ll develop the next facebook 🙂

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