All lessons

At the end of this lesson you can say exactly what a website builder is, what it is not, and which of the six build routes any product belongs to.

At the end of this lesson you can explain what a builder stores, what it renders, and why nobody can hand your site to you as a folder of files.

At the end of this lesson you can register a name, point it at anything, and move a live site without breaking your email.

At the end of this lesson you can pick one of the three real non-builder routes and know exactly what its free hosting will and will not let you do.

At the end of this lesson you have a real, valid, responsive page you wrote yourself — running locally and ready to publish.

At the end of this lesson you have a realistic date for your own site, and you know which part of the work will actually eat the calendar.

At the end of this lesson you have a five-year budget for your own site, priced at the renewal rate rather than the promotion.

At the end of this lesson you have an hour-by-hour plan for getting a real site online today, and you know exactly what that speed costs you.

At the end of this lesson you have worked through every pre-launch item, in order, and you know which ones actually apply to you.

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.

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.

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.

Free is real. It is paid for in subdomains, terms of service, and limits nobody reads until they bite.

The complete path from nothing to a live site, in the order a beginner should actually do it.