Start here
You are about thirty minutes from a website.
This guide has five short chapters. You will not open a terminal, type a command, or install anything on your computer. If a step ever asks you to, the guide has gone wrong, not you.
What Comet is, in one paragraph
Comet is a website builder that lives on your own web hosting. You upload one folder, open it in your browser, and answer some questions. From then on you write your pages in Comet, press Publish, and visitors see them. There is no monthly Comet fee and nobody else holds your site.
Three words you will meet immediately
- Host — the company that rents you space on a computer that is always
switched on and connected. If you already own a domain name like
myshop.com, you almost certainly already have a host. - public_html — the one folder on that host whose contents the public can
see. Some hosts call it
wwworhtdocs. Anything you put inside it has a web address. - Database — the filing cabinet your words and settings live in. The website is the shop window; the database is the stockroom. Chapter 3 sets yours up and it takes about three minutes.
The five-minute path
If you only have five minutes right now, do these three things. They are the ones that must happen in order, and after them your site exists and is yours.
- Upload the folder and open it in a browser. Chapter 1 · about 5 minutes. Ends with the Comet setup wizard on your screen and a green tick next to the host check.
- Claim the install and save your recovery code. Chapter 2 · about 2 minutes. Do this the same day you upload. Until you claim it, anyone who guesses the address can claim it instead of you.
- Connect your database. Chapter 3 · about 3 minutes. Ends with a green Connected badge and your database name on screen.
Chapters 4 and 5 — choosing how the site looks, and writing your first page — can wait until tomorrow. Nothing breaks if you stop after chapter 3.
The chapters
- 1 Get it online Unzip, upload to your host, open the address. Includes the two things that actually go wrong, and how to fix each one. ~5 min
- 2 Your admin login How Comet knows you are you. There is no “email me a reset link”, because there is no email — so the printed recovery code matters. ~2 min
- 3 Connect your database The chapter everything else hangs on. Two doors: one takes three minutes and a free account, one takes no signup and has a real price. ~3–5 min
- 4 Make it yours Five choices, with pictures: the shape of the page, the colours, the lettering, your logo, and what Google shows. ~10 min
- 5 Your first page, and Publish The one idea in Comet that is not obvious: draft versus published, and why Publish is the button that makes Google and Facebook see your work. ~10 min
- ? Something went wrong One page, sorted by the exact words on your screen. Find your message, read the two paragraphs under it, carry on. as needed
How to read this guide
Every chapter carries one green box like the one below — five in all, one per chapter, placed at the point where carrying on with something broken would start to cost you time. It names the one thing that must be true before you move on, and where to go if it is not. It is the widest, heaviest thing on its page, so you will not scroll past it by accident.
Check before you move on
You have read this box. If you have not, that is a paradox, and not covered in Something went wrong.
The numbered steps inside a chapter do not each carry one. That is deliberate: the guide has twenty-four steps, and a green box after every one of them would be twenty-four pieces of ceremony you would start skipping by chapter two. Five that you read beat twenty-four that you do not.
The guide never falls back on a vague “it will look about right”. It names the exact thing on the screen — a green badge, a red banner, a specific sentence — so you can tell success from failure without guessing. When something fails, the fix is filed under the exact words your screen is showing you.
This guide works with the internet unplugged
It is a folder of plain pages that came inside your Comet download. It loads no fonts,
no scripts and no pictures from anywhere else. You can read it on a train, print it, or
copy the guide folder onto a memory stick.
What you need before you start
- The Comet
.zipfile. You already have it — this guide came inside it. - A web host with a
public_htmlfolder, and the login for it. Almost all shared hosting works; the panel is usually called cPanel, Plesk or DirectAdmin. - About thirty minutes, and somewhere safe to write down two short codes.
- Optional but recommended: an email address you can sign in with, for chapter 3's quick door.
You do not need: a developer, a credit card, a terminal, Node, Rust, Docker, or any knowledge of what those words mean.
One thing that does not work, so you do not waste time on it
Double-clicking Comet's own index.html on your computer will not run
Comet. Browsers refuse to load a program from a plain folder path
(file:///…). Comet needs a real web address that starts with
http:// or https://. That is what chapter 1 is for.
This guide is different — it is ordinary pages, so double-clicking it is fine.