Our four-part tutorial on building an adult website continues with the second chapter. Before you can begin to build your site, you’ll need a hosting company, good content and an HTML editor… this week we’ll look at what’s involved in each of these three areas.Our four-part tutorial on building an adult website continues with the second chapter. Before you can begin to build your site, you’ll need a hosting company, good content and an HTML editor… this week we’ll look at what’s involved in each of these three areas.
Last week we took a look at the planning that goes into an adult website. We talked about domain names, revenue options and site themes. As a result, we have decided to build an AVS site that will offer pictures of Japanese college girls. We also registered the domain name “japanesecollegegirls.com” to use for the site.
This week we’ll talk about web site hosting, how to obtain content for your site, and choosing an HTML editor to use in designing and building your site.
Choosing a Hosting Company
Finding the right hosting company can be a bit of a chore – there are so many hosting companies out there, and each one seems to do things in an entirely different manner than the rest. Obviously you need to find a host that will accept adult websites. Most will not. If you try to put an adult site on a server that does not allow adult materiel, one day you’ll find that your entire site has suddenly been yanked offline, and it will take at least two days to get your site online again somewhere else. Finding an adult hosting company shouldn’t be too hard. Take a look at Hosting Corner for a few suggestions.
Free hosts are sometimes useful when you’re trying to conserve costs of expect high bandwidth a low sales volume. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of “free hosts” then you’re probably wondering what the “catch” is, right? If you sign up with a free host they will give you a few megs of space – plenty to set up a small adult website – and allow you to upload your site absolutely free of charge. In return, the free host will place advertisements at the top and bottom of every site that you build. If you’re simply building a free gallery and don’t want to pay the bandwidth bill then a free host might be the way to go – however, we’re making an AVS site and can’t afford losing surfers to a free host’s advertisements. Free hosts also don’t allow you to use your own domain name… another reason why a free host will not work for our little project.
Unfortunately, finding the right hosting company can sometimes need a little trial and error. Occasionally a company will sound great – boasting about their high speed connections at affordable prices – but in reality you find out that their technical support sucks, and the server your sites reside on have anything but a fast connection to the Internet. If you’re unhappy with the host you select initially, don’t be afraid to try a different host. I generally go with he.net for my hosting needs, so we’ll do the same with our Japanese college girls site.
We’ll want to get the new account set up as soon as possible. Remember, once I inform my domain name registrar of the hosting company that will serve my domain name, it will take about two days for that domain name to become accessible to most Internet users. When you sign up for your hosting account, make sure to ask your hosting companies what the DNS servers will be for your account. They should give you a server name and associated IP address for at least two DNS servers. You’ll want to contact your domain name registrar as soon as possible once you have this information. If you registered your domain name with DirectNic.com or other similar services, you can log on to your account through their web site and add the DNS information for your domain name. If you don’t know how to do this, contact technical support for your domain name registrar and tell them that you need help updating the DNS server information for one of your domain names. They’ll know how to help you from there.
The other vital bits of information that you’ll need to obtain from your hosting company when you sign up for a new account is your server name, your account name and your account password. You’ll need all three before you will be able to FTP to your server and upload your new website.
Licensing Content For Your Site
So now we have a domain name and a hosting company, but we need content. Just as was the case with hosting, there are quite a few content companies that you’ll have to research. You’ll need to find a company that you’re comfortable with – one that offers a wide range of pictures at affordable prices. Some companies will offer large volumes of pictures through CD ROMs, and others will sell you pictures by the set. Purchasing by the set generally means less pictures for your money, but it gives you greater control over which pictures and models will appear on your site. Licensing pictures by the set also allows you to spend a little bit now and a little bit later, instead of one large lump sum up front. This is your first website, though, so you’re gonna need some volume if you’re serious about getting started. Perhaps buying a CD is the way to go. There are a number of good Asian picture discs that are available… just make sure you spend a little time trying to find the right one. Expect to pay somewhere between $200 and $300 for a disc with several hundred pictures. Sometimes you’ll find bargain discs in the $100 range. Since your website is going to focus on Asian girls, you might have to search a little longer to find acceptable content. There are not as many content providers that offer Asian girls – you’d have a much easier time finding simple hardcore or American teens. The fact that good Asian content is so hard to find, however, adds to its appeal when it comes time to sell it to surfers. Remember that.
Try The Adult Webmaster Magazine’s Content Corner for listings of the top content providers the Industry has to offer. Content Corner also offers some valuable articles that will provide you with more in-depth information on buying content for your website.
“Imagine spending hundreds of dollars on content you can’t legally use because they provider won’t give you the name and address of the person keeping the records.”
Finding an HTML Editor
Once you’ve bought your content you’re ready to start building the site itself. That means you’ll need an HTML editor, unless you plan to do the whole thing with a text editor – something I don’t recommend doing. There are some free editors that you can use. Netscape Communicator, for example, comes with Netscape Composer. That’s the editor I used when I first got started building web pages. It’s not the best editor by any means, but it’s free. Other popular editors include Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Go Live and Microsoft FrontPage. That’s just the quick list, there are certainly other editors available if you do a little research. I’ve been using Go Live for quite a while now, and despite my recent distaste for Adobe as a company, I’m far too lazy to learn a new HTML editor. So we’ll use Adobe Go Live for the creation of our Japanese College Girls website.
If you’re going to pay for an HTML editor, spend a little time trying out the various major players. You’re gonna want to find an editor that makes sense to you. For me there may be no editor better than Adobe Go Live, and for you Dreamweaver might be the way to go. A lot will depend on how your personal style matches the user interface. You’ll also want to compare features, but don’t get too hypnotized by a long features listing… many of those features sound neat, but when it comes time to build your website you’ll never use them.
So that’s it for week two. Our new website is one week away from reality. We have our domain name, we have our hosting company picked out and we’re signed up for an account, we have our Asian content and we’ve picked out the perfect HTML editor for the job. We’re ready to start making some dust. Next week we’ll take a look at the actual creation of our adult website, then in the final installment of Your First Website we’ll market that baby! In the meantime I have a little homework for you – install that new HTML editor and start playing with its features. You’ll want to be somewhat familiar with the user interface when it comes time to build your site.
Connor Young is Editor-on-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine and currently lives in California where he also operates the CyberSultan.com adult search engine.
