Online Entrepreneurship for Guitarists

Website Services & Resources

• WordPress – A content management system (CMS) with a huge community and a ton of resources. It’s also free. This website runs on WordPress.
• If you don’t want to buy web hosting, check out WordPress.com. They’ll let you use your own domain for about $12/year.
• Weebly is a drag and drop style CMS. A lot of my readers have had success with it. Weebly is my top choice if you don’t want to mess with any code. That said, not being able to edit any code is extremely limiting.
• Drupal – Also a CMS.
• Joomla – A CMS.
• ModX – Another CMS.

Also check out 3 Cheap and Easy Website Solutions for Musicians.

Wikipedia has a good overview of what a Content Management System is.

Learning HTML & CSS

I used the book Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS to learn HTML and CSS.

You can also use w3school’s HTML and CSS tutorials.

HTML and CSS are markup languages. This means they’re not really programming. Instead, think of them as a way of describing text. If you want to tell a user agent (a fancy term for “Web Browser”) that a block of text is a paragraph, you wrap it in an html entity called a tag. Then when a user visits your page, the things wrapped in paragraph tags are rendered (appear) according to the style rules you set for them in your CSS file. Here’s an example (the bolded elements are HTML tags):

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p> 

And your CSS might look like this:

p {
    font-size:12px
    line-height:14px;
    font-family: Georgia, serif;
}