you STILL need a website RIGHT NOW!! (yes, even in 2024)

Last year I did a poll and I asked you, do you have a website? 81% of you still don't have websites even after I made this video. Why?

It takes like five seconds to make a website. Watch this. Done.

What do y'all think? House at a website. It's airplane.

Alright, fine. Give me five seconds. Okay, how about now?

No, it's still ugly. Okay, 10 more seconds. Okay, this is the winner.

What do you think? It's still hideous. I was like green.

I have no words to say until you fix. That. You know what?

I'm going to make you guys do this. You're going to build your own websites. I.

Don't want to do that. We don't know how to code. You tell you what, whoever has the best website gets a hundred bucks.

Really? Yeah. And these guys, they're going to vote on it.

Deal. Daddy, we hated this. Can I do this?

Yeah. Websites are stupid. Okay?

They're making some good points. Let's address those right now. First, you absolutely can make a website with ai.

In fact, here in a moment, I'm going to give the girls access to hosting here, which will make a beautiful website in about 10 seconds and just type in what they want and it happens. Are you serious? Why did you not do that before?

We could have used ai. And it's not just design. It'll actually help them make their blog posts and all the content.

And again, you're going to vote on who has the best website. The winner gets a hundred bucks. Now, before all that you got to know, you don't have to do anything fancy to make a website.

It can be as simple as this. The first one I made in about five seconds plain text. This works okay?

I can tell you're not believing me. Lemme show you. I follow this network engineer named Nick Russo.

This is his website, plain Text, and it's kind of amazing and I know for a fact it helps a ton of people and that's what you're going to do, help a ton of people. So most of you, you don't have a website right now. Let's change that.

I'm going to show you how to build a website like this and get it on the internet. It'll take about five minutes and it's free. No more excuses.

I mean, seriously, your perspective and what you have to offer is way too valuable. And before you even say, Chuck, I don't need that. I've got LinkedIn, I've got Twitter or X, not good enough.

And I'll go over my reasons why that is here in a moment. Actually at this timestamp actually right here, right here, sorry, video editors. But I want to get you online first.

Let's get your website up and running right now. And honestly, it's pretty much already done. Here's the code for our simple website, which you can just copy and paste if you want.

Again, it doesn't have to be anything more than this, but we have a problem right now. Our website isn't on internet, it's just a file on our computer. And sure when we open it, it looks and feels like a website.

But look at the URL, it's just a file. No one else can get to this but us. So to get our website, this file on the internet, we need to put this file on something called a web server, which is just a fancy name for another computer somewhere on the internet.

But this computer is special. It's designed to serve up websites when people ask for them, web server, website, server. And once we put our website file on this web server, people can then with their web browser, AKA, the client and they'll send a request to the web server.

Excuse me, waiter, I would like a delicious website, please. This is normally called an HT TP get message, get me some food. And what makes the web server a web server is that it's designed to accept these messages and then respond to them.

And normally with a 200, okay, message along with your website file. And that's essentially how pretty much every website works. But now how do we get our site, our file onto a web server?

And what web server, where do we put it? How do we find one of these guys? This is actually the easy part.

There are many web servers out there, most of them cost money, but you can actually host a website for free on a site called GitHub. GitHub is normally a site that coders and developers will use to manage their code, but they have this cool thing called GitHub pages, which will allow us to use a web server, their web server for free. And it takes like two minutes to get set up.

Let's do that right now. The first thing we'll do is head on over to github. com and if you don't already have an account, let's get signed up right now.

Now, once you're signed in, it can kind of feel overwhelming. Don't let it be. We're just going to do a few things here.

First, right here in the middle, it wants us to create a repository, also known as a repo. All this is a place where you're going to put our code, our website code, our file. So we'll create one real quick, we'll name it my website, nothing too crazy.

And we'll click the little radio button here to make it public. And then we'll click on create new repository. Now once we're here, it is kind of overwhelming, but all we want to do right now is upload a file.

You'll see this link right here, upload an existing file. That's how we're going to get started. Go ahead and click on that.

We'll find our website file index html and we'll just drag that over. There's our file and all we have to do now is click on Commit changes. I'm committed.

Let's go. Now there's only one more thing we have to do and it's super simple. On the top menu bar on the very far right, you'll see settings.

Go ahead and click on that. And then down here on the left, you'll see an option four pages. Go ahead and click on that.

And then right here in the middle, we're going to deploy from a branch. You don't have to worry about what that means right now. All you have to do is click on this little dropdown box, change it from none to main, and that's really all we have to do.

And now we'll click on save and you may have to refresh your page, but right now our website, it's on the internet, this is our URL, we can grab the sucker, open up a new tab, paste it website on the internet. Go ahead, share that with anybody. You're now the proud owner of a website.

It's on the internet. Congrats. Now I know what you may be thinking.

This name right here, this URL or domain name, it's not the greatest. It's got a GitHub in it. It's got your goofy username.

What if we want something more custom, like a real website, right? Like gilmore golfing. com.

This is totally possible, but it is the end of our journey where things are free. Getting a custom domain will cost you something, not very much. Lemme show you how right now, and we'll still use GitHub pages as our web server.

So to get a custom domain, we'll need to go out to what's called a domain registrar to register a domain. It's kind of fun to say registrar, there are a lot of these out there, but one of my favorites and the sponsor of this video is hosting here. And we'll go over to hosting your.

com/chuck or just click the link in the description. Now you could go over here and just click on domains and buy one from hosting here, but there's a deal going on later. In this video, I will show you how to build an amazing website.

Actually, you're not going to build an AI will and as this plan, you want three bucks a month plus three months free and it comes with a free domain, otherwise you can just buy a domain. But this deal's pretty killer. And also there's something else if you claim the deal and we'll choose this business plan, I'll show you more on this later.

You can throw in coupon code network Chuck and get an even bigger discount. How much is it? I don't know math, but it was cheaper.

Now I already claim this deal, so I'm going to click on domains to buy a new domain. Now just so you know, you can't buy a domain and then claim this deal later. You got to claim the deal first.

So go ahead and do that Now if you think you might want to build an amazing AI driven website. So we'll click on domains and then we'll try to find one. Or you can actually have AI generate your domain.

Okay, I am happy Gilmore and I want to make a blog about golfing. Let's see what happens. That's pretty cool.

But I want to see if they have Gilmore golfing. They do even tells you your domain is suitable for what you're trying to do. That's kind of cool.

And we could go. com or Gilmore golfing. cloud and that's only nine, 9 cents for the first year.

Pretty killer. Let's do that. We'll do some registration stuff and get the sucker once purchased.

You may have to do a few registration things, not a big deal. So now here's the state of things. We have our new domain name, Gilmore golfing.

cloud, which is being managed by our domain registrar and also our name server hosting her. The only thing we have left to do is to tell hosting her that when people go to our website, Gilmore golfing. cloud, we want to send them right over here to GitHub, the web server where our website lives.

Let's do that right now. It takes like three seconds actually like maybe 20 seconds right here in hosting. Here we have our DNS name server settings.

Let's click on that. Now. If you just set your domain up, it might need some time to brew.

And you may scroll down here and see that there's nothing here. If there's nothing here, give it some time. Refresh your page a few times until you see a whole bunch of, well, whatever this is.

Once you have this, we can start playing with it. To point our website to GitHub, we'll need to create what's called a DNS record and more specifically an A record. It's already set up for us.

You just got to tell it where to go. Right here where it says points to, I'm going to paste in this IP address. This is one of GitHub's IP addresses for GitHub pages.

You can use this one or just Google another one. They have a few. This one should be fine though.

I'm going to go ahead and click on add record. Now you may get a warning saying, Hey, you got two A records that have the same name. That's fine.

We'll fix that in a second. Go and click on confirm. You should get a DNS record, create a successfully message and then we'll go down here and delete that other a record We don't want scroll all the way to the bottom until we see.

Yep. Here are the two A records right here. This is the one we just created.

That's the one we want to keep. This one we don't like. We're going to take it away, click on delete.

Done. So now we're actually done with the hoster side, the domain registrar. It's pointing to GitHub.

Now we got to tell GitHub about this new domain. Let's go there. Back here at our pages configuration, we're going to scroll down just a little bit until we see custom domain.

All we have to do here is type in our custom domain, Gilmore golfing. cloud, and I'll click on save. Now what it's doing here is it's going to check to see if DNS is configured correctly, if it's actually pointing here and okay, it's already done.

It's working. It's even getting a secure certificate set up for us right now. Lemme refresh the page, see if it finished.

Okay, certificate is active. Let's test it out. Go to Gilmore golfing.

cloud. It's our first time ever visiting it. Yes, website up custom domain, it's secure.

That's amazing. Almost completely free except for the domain charge and you really can't avoid that. Now that was fun and this website is cool, but it's simple.

I know for some of you, and maybe most of you, you like to be fancy, you want to have a fancy website, I get it. I'm the same way. I want one too.

Or maybe you're a business and you got to have something a bit more professional than this. I get that. So this is the fancy and probably lazy part of the video where we're going to make AI do everything for us because it's 2024, we don't have to learn to code if we don't want to.

By the way, you should learn to code, you should learn Python, it's good for you, but we don't have to. AI can do this. So now I'm going to give my girls the power of AI to build their website and before I let them loose, lemme show you how AI website building works.

To do that, I'll head over to hosting your. com/chuck. Let's go ahead and claim that deal.

Now compared to our free option earlier, hosting is also a web server, but it's much more than that. If you look at their business plan, which is the one I would recommend, because you get a ton of amazing AI features, like you can actually build a WordPress site with AI tools, but they also take care of everything for you. Manage WordPress, which is a very popular way to build a website.

They take care of the vulnerabilities, back up updates, and with ai, they take care of the building too. And I know what you're thinking, Chuck. Isn't there value in learning how to build your own website, learning how to code and everything?

Yes, there is, but if you're like me, when you start going down that path, we start focusing more on building the website, then making content for the website. That's always a trap I fall into, I want to add this feature, then this feature and research how to code this or crap this broke. Lemme try and fix that for five days.

So by the end, I may have this kind of cool looking website but no content. And the whole point of it was to make content to share my ideas and what I'm studying and what I'm working on to help people. That's why I love this.

It allows me just to focus on the content. Now it's only 3 9, 9 a month plus three months free. You can create up to a hundred websites if you want, which by the way, that's what I'm going to do.

I mean not a hundred. I want to have my daughters come under one account. I'm only going to pay one fee and have them create a website in my account.

We can have multiple websites, so you could do that too. Maybe your family, each one in your family has a website with one plan. It's pretty killer.

You also get a free domain. So that whole domain thing we did earlier, baked in right here. So go ahead and grab it.

I want you to have your account. Lemme show you the power of AI website creation. I'm going to add a website and I'll have my girls do this.

I can either WordPress, which will have a ton of AI tools or hosting yours, website builder, which has a ton of AI power. Let's try that one Now from here, you can literally type in your dream what you want it to be, no coding, just from brain to website. And within moments, what they described is sitting right there.

They didn't have to code it, be really good at design and just happened. Now I'm going to let them tweak this and keep going. You can keep iterating, keep adding more AI stuff, add some blogs with ai, add some content with ai.

It's so cool. So I'll give them some time and then we'll judge their websites. Add Funny World, oh.

That's Mr Bean. That's Jonathan. The.

But while they're doing that, I want to get back to the reason why I think you need a website because you do, even if you already have LinkedIn, YouTube or Twitter, but I'll get to that. But first reason, number one, you will learn so much more, so much faster by sharing what you learn. I saw this great quote from Tiago Forte.

When one person teaches, two people learn. You may have heard me say it before, the best way to learn is to teach. So here's what you do.

Every time you're learning something, whether it's technical or something else, learn it. You're about to give a presentation on that sucker. You're about to get up in front of people and teach that, or you're about to make a YouTube video about it or you're going to make a blog post about it.

That's how you should learn, like you're about to share it because as you're learning, you should be taking notes. But I don't want you to take notes anymore. I want you to shift your mindset from taking notes to giving notes.

These notes will be used by you in the future when you forgot everything you learned and it'll be used by people you're sharing it with on your website. And the quote from Einstein and Feinman is totally true. If you can't explain it simply, then you really don't understand it.

And it's so funny because as you're studying a topic, you'll kind of have a moment where you think, I think I understand that. I kind of get it. But if someone were to ask you to explain it to them, you're stumped.

Silence, crickets. You don't know what to say. It's that process of figuring out how to explain it in your own words from your own perspective and a simple way.

That's where the real learning happens. Now, sure, you don't have to make a website to do this. You can make your own notes and never share them with the world, but what a robbery that is.

And that's point number two. You have a unique perspective, a unique view on the world, a unique way of teaching things and explaining things that is valuable to someone else. It is.

Everyone has this. Will it be a million people? Probably not, but all it needs to be is one person.

If one person can find your stuff and read it and be changed and affected, that's worth it. The whole reason I do what I do from becoming a network engineer to now a YouTuber, making content all the time. I do this because I was inspired by someone else from reading their blog, from watching their videos.

It's because they shared that I'm now sharing. You can be that for someone else. Lemme say it again.

You may not think that what you have to say is valuable, that no one's going to care. They will. Someone will.

Someone's going to gain something from that. Number three, having a website is going to help you get a job. It just will.

I created two videos talking about this. Websites are the new resumes. When I'm hiring someone and I get a candidate's resume, you better believe I'm Googling that person.

I'm looking up their website, I'm seeing what they do and what they care about. And a website is the best place to show prospective employers, places you want to work at that you know what you're talking about. They can see the way you write or make videos on your website and explain things.

They can see the technical things you've drawn out or studied. They can see the labs you've done. They can see that you make an effort and that you're consistent.

All those things are huge and can be done on a website in a really incredible way. And my fourth and last reason is something called a serendipity vehicle. I got this from David pll.

The idea is that by putting yourself out there, creating this website and writing blogs is that you never know what's going to happen from that. You don't know who's going to read that and what opportunities might come because of that. The more you put yourself out there, the more opportunities you have.

Now, this applies to pretty much every area in life, including a website. I'm speaking from experience here, putting myself out there, creating videos, making a website has opened up so many doors for me. I've met so many amazing people.

One of the prime examples I have is I got to meet Mr Beast's team and help him on a video. How will they found one of my videos? They saw my sites, they researched me and looked me up for a particular reason.

I wasn't looking for it. I wasn't even thinking I was on their radar. It just happened.

And that's got to be exciting, right? You never know what's going to happen. Just put yourself out there.

Now, you'll probably spend all day talking about all of that. I'm not going to do that, but I do want to get to this objection, Chuck. I've already got LinkedIn, I've got X Twitter, I've got YouTube.

Why do I need a website? Isn't that kind of archaic to have a website? I've got GitHub, I'm good.

Now, let me say this. I think it's great if you have all these sites and you get traction on these sites. I mean, I'm obviously a big fan of YouTube, but I got a few problems and maybe they're more philosophical views, but I want to see what you think.

First, my number one problem, my number one objection is that it's someone else's website. It's someone else's stuff. YouTube is not mine.

GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, X, it's not yours. Yes, you're posting stuff. Yes, you have a profile, but you're at the mercy of whatever these platforms want to do.

Whether they die next year, change their algorithm or decide that you're not welcome there, but your own website, you're in control. And to me, I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a child of the nineties and I grew up with the internet and websites, but to me, a website seems timeless when you create a website. I feel like it's a lasting thing that's not subject to anything else.

I mean, sure, SEO is a thing. Can people Google you and find you? But no matter what new platform comes out or what platform dies, it's the website that has always been the thing, the thing that stood the test of time.

And that will only change when you want it to. And I guess to point number two, and that's your stuff can get kind of lost in the weeds when you create on other platforms, whether it's LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or whatever it is, you're a slave to the algorithm. Whatever they decide is going to be shown to people and your stuff is a slave to how they're going to present it.

Whereas on a website, again, you're in control. This is your own place. Your curation of your thoughts and ideas, what you're studying, you choose how it's presented, how it's formatted, whether it's very simple, whether it's really, really fancy.

It's up to you. And I like this from another perspective too, and it's kind of counterintuitive to what I'm normally doing on YouTube is that you're not a slave to the algorithm. You could create what you want to create and you're not worried about hitting a hot topic or trying to get on it, trying to get views, likes, comments.

It's more about just providing value, which should be the aim whenever you create anything anywhere. But the temptation isn't quite there with your own website. I love that.

Now, don't get me wrong, you should use LinkedIn. You should use Twitter. You should use YouTube to put your website links on.

So when you're making a post, have that go back to your website, use these tools to promote yourself and get your name out there and influence more people. But have this website. Is your home base, your corner of the internet?

Because again, one day, all these sites, all these social media sites, they may be gone. But your website, I think I hope will remain, make your stinking website. I want to see it.

I would love to visit it. I want to see what you do. Speaking of, let's go see what my daughters did.

Every time we do a competition, Chloe always wins the last competition. Chloe won 1000 bucks, 2000 bucks, and I didn't win anything. And I always lose cl.

I really, really, really, really need to win and look at my website. It's so much better than Chloe's and I really need you to vote for me. I'm Chloe.

And you probably heard maybe that you website, me and my sister are doing a challenge to see who votes for the best website. I hope you pick mine because it's probably the best. If you like those things that I.