Your First Website: A Beginner’s Guide to Choosing, Building, and Securing a Website (Site Reliability Engineering)

Creating your first website is easier than ever—but deciding how to build it can be surprisingly complicated.

Should you learn HTML and CSS? Use WordPress? Choose a drag-and-drop website builder? Use an online "kit"? Try a static-site generator? Or, if you want to sell products, should you use a dedicated e-commerce platform?

Your First Website helps beginners answer those questions before they spend time and money building the wrong thing.

Rather than teaching one particular technology and pretending it is the answer to every problem, this practical guide explains the major ways websites are built and helps you understand the trade-offs between simplicity, flexibility, cost, maintenance, and control.

You will learn:

• How websites actually work
• What HTML and CSS do
• How website builders and hosted platforms work
• What WordPress and other content-management systems provide
• When a static website may be the simplest solution
• When a custom web application makes sense—and when it does not
• How to choose hosting and register a domain
• How to build the basic pages of a website
• Why HTTPS matters
• How to protect administrator accounts
• How authentication and user accounts work
• What information websites should—and should not—collect
• Why backups are an essential part of security
• How common web attacks work at a beginner-friendly level
• What changes when you add a shopping cart
• How online payment processing works
• Why you generally should not handle customers' payment-card information yourself
• How to think about shopping-cart and e-commerce security
• What to do if your website, hosting account, or domain is compromised

The book also includes practical decision worksheets, security checklists, technology vocabulary, and example architectures for different kinds of websites.

Most importantly, Your First Website teaches a principle that can save beginners considerable time, money, and frustration:

Don't build a more complicated website than you actually need.

Whether you want a personal site, an author's website, a small-business presence, a blog, or an online store, this book will help you understand your choices and build with security in mind from the beginning.