No matter how much time you spend surfing the web, you will never truly be a web ‘master (pun intended)’ until you create and develop a website.  Below is a simple to follow tutorial that will put you on the path to creating your first web page and will allow you to join the growing ranks of web developers.

For a long time, hosting a server, especially and HTTP one, was a very difficult and technical task.  Now, thanks to MAC OS X, hosting is actually easy.   The OS actually includes a ‘one-click’ option that creates a serer for you with… you guessed it, just one click, but this article delves a little bit deeper into the nuances of web development and will show you how to create an advanced server that can manage server-side languages including PHP.

This task isn’t for the faint of heart and some technical knowledge is required.

Ingredients List:

1. MAMP (its free)
2. DynDNS account (its free)
3. A home network with admin privileges so you can forward ports.
4. A Mac.  You want to use a Mac that will be on all the time.  Remember that anytime you shut down so will your site, so a laptop makes a poor choice here.
5. A CMS like WordPress (its free) or Drupal (its free) if you want.

Steps to Creating your Server:

Install your MAMP – MAMP is an open-source platform for Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP that allows you to host a website on your Mac.  Download from the disc image and open it.  Drag and drop the MAMP folder right into your Applications folder in order to install it.  Browse to locate the /Applications/MAMP folder.  This will end up being your ‘control center.”  As you create websites, they will be saved here.  Any configuration you do will also be placed here.

Configure your MAMP – Open the MAMP.app file that is located in your /Applications/MAMP folder.  Once you do this, the HTTP server will start.  Next, click on the preferences tab.  Once here, you must deselect “Stop Servers when quitting MAMP.”  You must also deselect “Check for MAMP PRO when starting MAMP.”  If you do these two steps, you will not have to keep MAMP open all of the time and the servers will stay on.  Next, click on the ‘Ports” tab.  Once there, select “Set to default Apache and MySQL ports.  These are standard settings.  It’s a good idea to use them because if you don’t, for example you leave it at port888; once you are finished your URL will become www.levoltz.com:888.  This is cumbersome and annoying.

Set-up to Share – Under the “System Preferences” tab, click on the sharing button.  Next, select File sharing, but be sure to also check on the Options button.  You will want to confirm that the “Share files and folders using FTP” is selected.  Whenever you are editing a website remotely, FTP is the standard.  You can use tools like Coda or Dreamweaver to edit and they both use FTP (or the more secure SFTP).  Select “done.”  Next, you need to deselect Web Sharing.  If you leave it selected, the server Apache that is installed on your Mac when you purchase will cause conflicts with the one you just installed.  Last, check that the box for remote login is selected.  This is important because it is the easiest way to control your computer and allow for remote restarts of the server.

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