About Me

Education
I'd like to be able to tell you I have a degree in web design and that I'm trained in HTML, CSS and PHP but unfortunately I have no formal training at all. The only criteria I met was having a strong desire to design, publish and maintain my own web sites. Plus, I only have a high school education. I was born in 1960 and I graduated in 1978, so I didn't even learn computers in school. In fact, I didn't even own a computer until 2002 and I had to use dial up until 2011 because DSL was not available where I live until then.
Desire
I love to write and English was my best class in school. The bottom line is I just wanted to publish a web site and didn't want to get bogged down in all of the formal training. After all, this wasn't going to be a career. Actually, thinking back, I did learn some HTML. In 2004 I was using a sitebuilder called Soholaunch but I didn't like any of the templates within that builder so I thought I would learn enough HTML to design my own pages. Well, the site was very lackluster and didn't perform all that well but none the less it was my very first site and I was somewhat proud of it. Of course no one needs to know any HTML at all to produce a web site depending on which site builder is used but it is a good idea to at least know some basics. Often times, a little tweaking of the code will get you better results but again it's not completely necessary.
Equipment
Do you need the latest and greatest computer to publish your own web site? Simply put, no. I published this site and all of my current sites with a $200 Compaq Presario laptop with Windows 7, a 1.00 GHz AMD processor and 2GB of RAM. Plus, the fastest internet connection available in my area is 1.5 MB DSL.
Tools
My arsenal of site building tools consists of one paid for sitebuilder which is WYSIWYG 10 and RVSitebuilder Pro supplied with my web hosting account. All of the other tools are free which are: Irfanview, PhotoScape, PosTextEffects, Paint.NET and PhotoFiltre. Irfanview and PhotoScape are used for image editing and PosTextEffects, PhotoFiltre and Paint.Net for graphics and logo creation.
Camera
Another thing that's handy from time to time is a digital camera. Currently I'm using a 12 Megapixel Nikon CoolPix, Photos can be used in backgrounds, in logos or for photo galleries. It's just a useful tool to have around.
Persistence
So, as you can see you don't need tons of fancy or expensive tools or even a formal education to create your own sites but you will have to be persistent in learning as well as having the desire to do this yourself.