A free course · no tool is being sold to you
Learn how websites actually get made.
A free course that takes you from nothing to a live website, and tells you honestly which of the three routes fits you before you spend anything. Nothing here is for sale, which is why the advice can be blunt.
A website builder
Pick this if you want it live this week and never want to think about updates.
WordPress
Pick this if you'll publish a lot, and someone will genuinely maintain it.
Write the code
Pick this if you want to understand the machine — or the site is genuinely tiny.
Not sure yet? That’s the normal state. Lesson zero walks you through it.
Latest lessons
The full syllabus →GitHub Pages for Beginners: Put Your First HTML Page Online for Free
At the end of this lesson your blank-file page is live at a github.io address, with your own domain pointed at it if you want one.
How to Publish a Website: Hosting by Route, and What It Costs After Year One
Built with a builder, WordPress or plain files? That one answer decides who hosts your site, what it costs from year two, and how it goes live.
How to Make a Website for Free, and What Free Costs You
Free is real. It is paid for in subdomains, terms of service, and limits nobody reads until they bite.
How to Make a Website: The Whole Path, in Order
The complete path from nothing to a live site, in the order a beginner should actually do it.
How to Build a Website Builder
At the end of this lesson you can name every component a builder needs, choose a stack for it, and tell which open-source projects are actually alive.
Most advice about how to create a website is written by somebody who needs you to pick a particular tool. That is not a conspiracy, it is just how the internet pays for itself — but it does mean the honest answer to "which should I use?" is rarely the one you get. This course has no tool to sell, so it can give you the boring, accurate version instead.
What this course covers
Ten lessons, in order. What a website builder actually is and how one works inside. What a domain is and why DNS makes people cry. How to build a site without a builder, including writing the HTML yourself. What the whole thing costs, how long it really takes, and what to check before you press publish. The full syllabus is here — start at Lesson 01 if you are new, or skip to whichever part you are stuck on.
Three routes, and how to tell which is yours
You can pay a company to host and build it for you, you can run software on hosting you rent, or you can write the files yourself. Each is genuinely correct for somebody, and each is genuinely wrong for somebody else. The deciding factors are not technical ability — they are who will maintain it, how much you will publish, and whether you need to be able to leave. Work through the eight questions and the answer usually becomes obvious.
How this site is different
Tools get named here as examples, never ranked or scored. There is no "best website builder" list, because the honest answer depends on facts about you that a list cannot know. Where a figure comes from a vendor's own documentation we say so; where the industry repeats a number nobody can source, we say that too, and there is more of the second kind than you would expect.
If a lesson tells you that you do not need something yet, that is the lesson working. Half of learning to build a website is learning what to ignore for now.
Where to start
If you want the whole map before you touch anything, read the complete path. If the vocabulary is the problem, Lesson 01 defines the words properly. And if you just need to know what this is going to cost you before you commit, that lesson is here.