Yes, I webmastered/designed this site, which started as hobby. Anyway, this article is written to give informative approach on the experience.
What you need to put up a web?
Finally, you find out you need a website to support a business or simply have an online presence. Your business will have a different horizon bumping around the virtual highway. "Welcome to the real world!"
Domain Name
If you are a serious hobbyist or biz person, you can buy your domain name.
You can start by visiting sites that can help you buy one ..say www.blah.com, "blah" is the domain name.
Try looking up if your desired domain name is taken:
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/
http://www.godaddy.com
I am not advertising these sites, I just need to show resources.
Read more:
Buying Domain Names
Affordable Domain Names
Web host
Once you have a domain name, where do you put your files? that is where the web host comes in. Sometimes when you buy a domain name, there is already a package for web hosting that goes with it so you can at once function and upload your files in less than 48 hours. This could save you a lot of time and money. Unless, you really want the mess, you can set up your own server running 24 hours, 7 days a week for this purpose and run your site there. Plus if you run your server, you will need an IT person with you.
The main reason why companies want to have their own server housing their own website is for security reasons. If you hold a database of about a million subscribed clients, you cannot protect private information if you put the data in a server remote to you, say in another country (?). Companies would spend money to run their own servers and hire people who will maintain it.
If you choose to pay for webhosting, you may use the search engines to look for the right webhost with favorable packages to serve your needs.
The bottom line of FREE Web hosting:
I stayed at Geo for many years before establishing my own site. I should be grateful when yahoo took over geocities, the "amenities" expanded to the max.
Free hosts have all the rights to put advertisements in your page, but that is their privilege. There is no point to fret about the disadvantages. You can always leave them if you find the option one-sided. By experimenting on availing free hosting services, I have learned a lot about the start of webmastering.
Content:
That is the job all about. Are you authoring the site? Or you want to do the content only, then someone will webmaster for you...It will cost.
Content is important in a website. There are better places around the web and investing on good contents mean business and high traffic. Contents come in different forms, both graphics and texts, aided by multimedia enhancements (audio/video), realtime interactions (forums/blogging), etc...Infinite possibilities.
Scripts:
These are forms and other interactive options you can add to your website. Scripts could be downloaded freely; they could also be provided by your web hosts. Understanding them needs further study. Your hired webmaster can do this task for you. If you have an understanding of reading source codes, you can improvise from an existing code and customize it for your benefit. I have explained this, if you read further.
Graphic Arts:
A site could run with or without graphics. But try to think of a newspaper without any photography in it...Do you think it will be interesting?
Hire a graphic artist for your website, or a webmaster with this capability. Graphic arts is the flair in web sites. Photoshop and Macromedia (Fireworks/Flash) are important applications for web development. For dreamweaver user, Fireworks work well as a partners, while counterparts in Adobe Photoshop is Image Ready.
Plenty of options out there!
Designing graphics for web is all about manipulating resolutions and optimizing as consideration to visitors. Nowadays, processors are fast to handle even high-res images, but still, if you will cater to get audience, all graphics must have to be small in file size.
| GIF or JPEG? |
These two formats are the most versatile for optimization for web purposes. Use GIF if you do solid colored, poster-like graphics with no gradients. Use JPEG for Photos with gradients.
GIF is best for doing transparencies. Optimize before exporting your graphics to make your site fast. |
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| RESOLUTION |
I started this web 640x480 in 1997 when 15" monitors are still common and Netscape still hovers the web freely... I don't care, until one day I noticed the web was gigantic in a 17" monitor and horror with 19" monitor!
Now, almost all monitors start with 800x600 screen resolution. Always assign the minimum resolution to your web for the sake of getting most of the readers. |
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Psychedelic Fonts:
"I want my personality be a signature in my web through stylish fonts!..."
But when you upload, it gracefully converts again to ARIAL:-)...
Open your handy-dandy Graphic Arts editor and convert your hi-tech font to graphics. In that way it will be an image and not read by html as font.
For great stylish fonts, try http://www.highfonts.com (this site will hook you!)
To flash or not to flash?
Flash web sites are common nowadays, that is if your bandwidth is high. One of my favorite flash sites is http:www.mrbean.co.uk . Well, it is justified. They did that site in flash so that it is a vector and not bitmap, in that case they can make it run clear no matter how they resize the browsers.
VECTOR GRAPHICS VS BITMAP. Flash is purely mathematically computed vector graphics, it does not pixellate like a BITMAP, that is why the output is CLEAR. I will show illustrations of this soon for better understanding.
To flash a web site means a lot...First, does your site really need it? Do you want your visitors to download the plug in if they don't have it? However, if you really need an impressive site, then flash it. The interface would be greatly different. When you simply hyperlink with HTML's, in flash you action script all commands. It will load slower if you put bitmap graphics, but will be great advantage and fast for cartoon (poster-like rendered) sites.
Flash can be handled easily nowadays.
Web Spiders
In your HTML editor, get familiarize with META NAME/KEYWORDS. These are word assignments that you assign in your web so that when a searcher types a word in the search engine, your web will be selected from the database. A lot of sites abuse the use of this by putting up one keyword 50 times. If you really intend to be useful to web, just stick to using that function rightfully.
Then, not to waste around META's, Whatever you do, all search engines send their robots picking up every bit of words you put up in your web...Then in 6 weeks time, you are searchable.
MORE ON ROBOTS: You can tame how these robots will scavenge your site by adding some scripts (robot.txt). Done with notepad as "robot.txt" file, you place some commands to disallow SE robots from looking at hidden (but accessible) subdirectories in your server to avoid folders from being included MERCILESSLY for world wide search. Robots pick up even dead links, that's why it will make you jerk why the heck your unlinked file is in the search engine! Specify good meta keywords and phrases properly and add do robot.txt, then it will be quite fine.
JAVA MANIA
Geeks can spruce up site functionality with java scripts. To enjoy it in a web site, the browser must be configured to run Java scripts. It means, if you will integrate this to your site, there is constraint. anyway, it is one of the coolest add-ons. Why make it hard when you can download the scripts all around the net. They are available for free use. Thanks for the creative people who shared their skills in java!
Making Web pages with 1000 pages Easy to Maintain and Update
For advanced users and technically well-versed in scripting and coding, the best solution in making the most of interactive approach in web design is developed with PHP and other dynamic formats. Learning PHP requires in-depth programming capabilities or background. Examples of such sites are those with Forums, Boards and Blogs. Actually, any site concept could be done in PHP. Starting from scratch is an arduous task. One could shorten the method by using paid or shareware programs with web development capacity. These programs are integrated freely for webmasters' use depending on your chosen web host.
Anyway, if you still prefer the primitive way of doing the web, there are ways that have been tested already. The methods may sound old, but for me, they are reliable. It is the system used in this web.
Hallelujah to SSI and CSS!!!
SSI (Server side includes) - runs in apache servers. Servers have to be configured to use this directive! Respectfully, this web site is using server-side includes. Although this will not reflect when you look at the source code, but I have different htm files: a header, right side menu, footer. My main page that has the contents of my page are divided into important tables that contain the SSI code. Say my top table contains:
<!--#include file="header.htm" -->
This is what is read on top of my table, and not the RGB graphics above that you are seeing. If by chance I get tired of that image, I could edit my header independently, add an update of desired graphics and the rest of my web pages will read the directive. All headers of my pages will change automatically. GREAT!
If you have apache running locally at home, it could be configured so it can read extensions such as: htm, txt, html, shtml etc.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - understanding this is not as hard as one thought. Reading "help" in your application is even more complicated, though at least you really need to dig the technical of this before you can figure out.
CSS is very helpful in maintaining that "common feel" and "look" of your web page all throughout. The moment you start a web and started changing the fonts, assign it a name and create a CSS file. Another way is, you can at once avail a pre-designed CSS format, save it into your filename and attach it to your web.
CSS is not only limited to fonts but also in:
- fixed background color for the entire site
- color of hyperlinks: visited, active
- tables, etc
Once you upload your site, make sure that you have the CSS file in the right path (say the root directory) so it can do its function properly.
For further reading:
www.bignosebird.com - my favorite web-authoring site. The author is an expert web guru. His site opened a lot of web horizons to the curious flock.
