Building Your Own Website – Part 1: Infrastructure

If you’ve got a strong vision of what you want to achieve, and eagerness to learn, and a healthy dose of patience, then building a beautiful, functional, fully-customisable and user-friendly website is well within your grasp.

Website design has traditionally been a time-consuming and expensive exercise, with high-end sites costing tens of thousands of dollars and taking months to deliver. But for the vast majority of businesses and people, a simple, elegant and functional website that satisfies all of their needs can be put together for a fraction of the time and cost.  We can get you up and running in less than a week for under $2000 if you’d like.  Or, if you’re willing to put in the hard yards and hours required, you can build a beautiful site yourself.

Here’s a  layperson’s guide that runs through the process step by step – including all the information I wish I had known when I was starting out.

In part 1 of this series, before we even get started with the design process, we set up all the infrastructure we’ll need to host our website: we choose and register a domain name, find a good web host, and make sure that our domain and host are communicating properly with each other.

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Crowd-funding, Social Media and the Online Audience – What We’ve Learned

When we began writing a light-hearted comedy script called The Weatherman, we had no idea it would lead us headlong into the world of crowd-funding campaigns, social media awareness and online audience engagement. But a couple of years later, and after raising $80,000 from a global online viewership for what would become the World’s First Crowdfunded Television Series, it’s fair to say we’ve learned a thing or two along the way.

We never intended to crowdfund our show. The very idea seemed preposterous – who on earth would fund a project of this scale with nothing but philanthropic intention? But when we met with Aubrey Levy of Mobcaster at the screening of our self-funded pilot of The Weatherman at the New York Television Festival in 2011, he believed the time had come for just such a crazy idea. In fact, he’d built an entire platform around it.

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The Weatherman

A brief history of the long journey of The Weatherman – a passion project which went from a no-budget labour of love to a 20th Century Fox broadcast property, with some twists and turns in between.

We’re often asked about The Weatherman: where it’s going, where it’s been and how we arrived where we are today. What follows is an exhaustive re-telling of long hours, low-budgets, good luck and great people.

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