So you want a web site? What do you do next? How do you get it? How do you create it?

Deciding to have a web site is a big step, here are some tips to help.

First you need to decide what is going to be on your site, what you want to offer and who your audience is. You must offer something on a web site in order to get people there and you need to decide who your audience it to make it appropriate.

Once you have decided what you want to offer and who your audience is, you need to get your ideas together. You need to get the info you want on the site, pictures, and anything else you want on your site together. Going over all the content that will be on your site is a good idea because it will allow you to see if you have any conflicting information and serve as the first time you edit the content. You should also type all of your information orderly in a Word doc to help with spelling and grammar and because having it in a digital form will help you much later when you copy and paste it in your site.

Next, you need to decide what type of site you want. This blog posting is not aimed at web professionals so I will not speak of the many content management services. For simplicity, you need to decide if you want a traditional static web site where the pages are changed manually or if you need some sort of content management system. You would want a content management system if you are going to write about stuff often. For example, if you are a food critic, you will be writing about restaurants often. For this instance, you would want a blogging service. There are many out there like blogspot and wordpress. You can get a free account from most of these. I actually suggest WordPress at Wordpress.com or going to Wordpress.org and installing the free blog software with your own hosting which will give you more options and features.

Now you need to find out the name or web address which is really called a domain name and where to host your site, the place you site will be on the web. If you choose to put your site on wordpress.com, you will already have a domain name. There are free and paid ways to host a web site but if you want your own unique domain name, you need to pay. For example, you can get a free site from Yahoo’s geocities but your domain name will be *****.geocities.com. So if you wante bigpcgeek, it would be bigpcgeek.geocities.com. The other downside is that you will have adds on your web site which would be great if you mad the money but you don’t. If you want your own unique domain name like www.bigpcgeek.com, you will have to buy a domain name and web hosting from sites like GoDaddy or Domain.com. I suggest 1and1.com because they always seem to have the most to offer for the best price. When purchaseing hosting from 1and1.com, you can create a web site from scratch or use their own site builder. When you create you own site, there is no limit, when you use their site builder, there is a limit on pages and on content. If you have no idea how to do any of this, you might want to get some help from companies like BigPcGeek.com (yes, a shameless plug) who create web sites from scratch. If you decide to create your web site on your own from scratch, you will need software to create it like DreamWeaver or FrontPage.

After your site is created, you need to get your site on the net. Huh? Ok so your site is on the net when you type www.****.com in your web browser but what about when you search for it on Google. If it is not in Google, you don’t exist online.  Most hosting companies offer SEO (search engine optimization) help or paid SEO to help get you on search engines. First, do not pay for any SEO, it is all free. If your web host gives you a free service like 1and1 does, use it but if not, don’t waste your money on it when it is free. All you have to do is do a Google search for site submission on the search engine of your choice. For example, if you do a Google search for "submit site to Google," the first result will google.com/addurl where you can add your web site to Google. It can take a few months but you will eventually be one Google’s search results. You don’t want to stop there, you will want to talk to your web designer about meta tags to get better relevant results, get other web sites to link to you, and finally keep the most relevant information of your site at the top of the page. All will help to get the people you want to your site.

This is just a start, I hope it helps.

It has been my opinion for quite some time that defraging your hard drive every week it overkill and too intensive on your hard drive. I have no idea if the way Vista defrags your hard drive is with less stress on the drive than XP but Vista by default automatically defrags your drive every week. At this point, until I have more information, I recommend you modify the setting to defrag hard drive to only once a month. To do this, right click on your hard drive, select "properties," then the "tools" tab, "defragment now," and finally "Modify Schedule." In the Modify Schedule box which is called Disk Defragmenter, you can select a different schedule and it should change the schedule for all drives you have in your computer.

If you don’t want your computer to defrag your drives on a schedule, just uncheck the box, "Run on a Schedule (recommended)," when in the Disk Defragmenter dialog box is open. When you want to do a defrag, just go back to the Disk Defragmenter dialog box and select, "Defragment Now."

Windows Vista has a cool auto-preview that will allow you to preview select files in Windows Explorer by clicking the file once. All you have to do is click the "Organize" button, select "Layout," and "Preview Pane." Now when you click once on a picture or word document you will see it preview in the right side of the right side of Windows Explorer. Some files take longer to preview than others but it is a great start on Microsoft’s part. Once you click on a particular file and it opens, any other file types that are the same extension will open much faster. For example, if you click on a Word doc and it takes a few seconds to open, you find any other word files will preview very quickly.

I recently purchased a Blu-Ray Player not for my home theater system but for my computer and there are some things people should know before they try to tackle adding Blu-Ray to players to their computer. Luckily, I had been planning this so I was not as unprepared as some might be.

First HDCP which stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection and it is the new wave of copy protection added to Blu-Ray movie discs. The key to remember is that all devices in your computer that a Blu-Ray movie’s data will transfer through needs to be HDCP compliant or the movie won’t play. This means the Blu-Ray drive need to have HDCP but that should be included in all Blu-Ray players, your video card must be HDCP compliant, and finally your monitor must be HDCP compliant. If you have a computer with none of this, it can be very costly to add a Blu-Ray player and it might be cheaper to get a dedicated player for your TV. One last part you will need is software to play it on like Power DVD Blu-Ray edition which may be included with your Rom drive.

Seriously, this copyright junk really makes life miserable for honest people but it is necessary given all the people who steal movies and music over the Internet. HDCP is no joke, I have an nvidia 8800 GTS which is a high end HDCP compliant. To test HDCP, I connected my 8800 to two monitors, one HDCP compliant, and one not. I decided to move a playing Blu-Ray movie between the HDCP compliant monitor over to the non-compliant and as soon as I moved the window, it stopped playing and threw an error message at me. No exceptions, HDCP needs the Blu-Ray player, special video card, special monitor, and Blu-Ray player software. There is a possibility that there is some other HDCP compliant hardware that may be necessary which I have and have not heard of. This was tested on Windows Vista, I have no clue if XP will support Blu-Ray even with compliant hardware.

Everything I say goes for Windows computers only, all of you Mac people have to wait till Apple decides to add the functionality.

This tip assumes you have successfully installed your new hard drive and the jumper settings are correct.

Most people think they have to use the software CD that comes with their purchased hard drive simply because they don’t see the hard drive in Windows when they turn on the computer. This is simply not necessary because Windows has a tool built in to add a hard drive. All you need to do is right-click on My Computer or Computer depending if you have XP or Vista respectively, and select "Manage." This will bring up the Computer Management console. From there, click "Disk Management" in the left column. All of your drives will load. You will see your newly installed disk, right-click on whatever number it is and select New Volume and follow the steps. My mind is fuzzy at this point, but after this, you may need to right-click again to the area of the right of the disk number and select format.

Just as I told how to rip music with iTunes, Windows Media Player has some options that make ripping CD’s to your computer much easier than traditional methods. Sure everyone can do this but I want to make your life easier and more efficient with software, computers, and technology.

There are many many ways to do this but this is my method for when you have stacks of CD’s that you want to copy to your computer.

What you want to do is click options in Media Player. When you open up Media Player, there are buttons at the top called Now Playing, Library, Rip ect. What you need to do is click "More options" in the drop down menu that is found when you click a very small arrow under any one of these buttons.

When the options windows opens up, click the "rip music" tab. The first option you can change is the place where you rip your music. If you have a special place for your music, change it here otherwise the default will be the My Music folder. Next, under rip Settings you can select the format for the music and more. The rip settings is a place you want to pay attention to because it is where your life can get a lot easier if you have a stack of CD’s to rip. Click "Rip CD when inserted" and check "always." This basically means anytime you insert a CD in Windows Media player, it will copy the music to your computer. The other thing to do is check "Eject CD when ripping is complete." With this selected, you will notice the CD tray open after the computer finished copying the music. Now you can go about doing whatever you need to do and not worry about copying the stack of CD’s, just insert a CD when you see the tray open. Finally, the last part you can choose the the audio quality. The best level is the level you cant notice and change in your music so I would do a trial and error rip to make sure you are happy with the audio quality before you rip your entire collection.

One other thing I would suggest is clicking the privacy tab and check "Update music files by retrieving media info from the Internet" which will update your music track names automatically to their names.

Do you have a collection of CD’s and need to rip them into iTunes to fill up your new ipod? There is a hard way and an easy way. The hard way is not changing anything in iTune’s settings and ripping music the way it is set to. The easy way is to change settings in iTunes so that you can pop in a CD anythime and have iTunes rip your music automatically.

First, click edit on the upper left part of iTunes and click preferences. A windows will pop up and you need to click the advances tab at the top of the window and then click importing on a new set of tabs within the advanced tab. The next part is key. You need to select "Import CD and eject" in the drop down menu where it says "On CD Insert." After the first CD is inserted in your computer when iTunes is open, iTunes will automatically rip the CD and then eject the CD tray when finished. This is important because you don’t have to stay at your computer, just look over at your computer and insert a new disc anytime you see the CD tray open.

There are other very useful options that you can use here too. You can decide what format you want your music to be imported with which can save space or make your music work with more devices. Next, pay attention to the quality settings because it is not worth doing all this if the music sounds horrible afterwards. It is also probably important to uncheck the option to play songs while importing music. Another important setting to check is "Automatically retrieve CD track names from Internet." This feature is really nice because you don’t have to create the names of the tracks saving time and making file management much better. Also make sure "Create filenames with track number."

Computers are made to make your life easy, it is time to make them do it. You can also do this in Windows Media player with similar options.

I told you once how to remove startup programs to speed up your computer but it can get annoying having to that over and over each time you install something new.

WinPartol 2007 is free and will fix this problem. WinPartol is available in a paid PLUS version that includes other stuff but it is not needed for what I am about to tell you. The free version will not only manage startup programs, but it will tell you when a new program adds itself to try to start up. This way, any time you add new software, WinPatrol will alert you if it tries to start when your computer starts. If you like WinPatrol, I suggest you pay for the full version.

You can get WinPartol here

Ever received a zipped file or needed to send a zipped file in your PC or Mac and been told you need to buy a compressing program like Winzip? In most cases, you don’t need to buy any program. In most cases, when you receive a zipped file on a PC or Mac you can double click or click respectively and follow the instructions to get the compressed files.

If someone has requested you send them a zipped file in email or something, you don’t need to buy any software. Here is what you do:

On a PC, create a folder and put the files needed in it, then right click, select "send to," and finally "compresses (zipped) folder." This creates a zipped file you can use to send as an email attachment. If you need to add a password in order to open the zipped file you need to buy software and if you receive a file compressed by a proprietary program you may need to buy software.

In a Mac, the process is almost the same although the version of OSX might make the wording different. Ok… Create a file folder, then put the files in it. Then you need to do the same as a right click in Windows. Either hit "ctrl" and then click the mighty mouse on the folder or ditch the dumb Apple mouse and get a good windows mouse so you can right click. If you are using Leopard, then after right clicking you want to select "compress." Older versions of Mac OS’s may call this archive etc.

Be safe, use this site to check and make sure the anti-spyware you use is not actually spyware itself. www.SpywareWarrior.com