Building Your
Own Website, Part II
By Robin Nobles (Continued from last week)
Okay, you have an HTML
editor, you have plotted out your
website, and you've taken time to read a
few tutorials on what to do. Simply fire
up that fancy editor, pick an appropriate
template (which is simply a skeleton of a
page where you can enter in your own
data), and play. HTML editors have a very
handy feature that allows you to preview
the page as you're working, so I
recommend clicking on that preview button
often! This will show you how the page
would look on the Web.
Once you've gotten your
feet wet with HTML, you can begin to add
other things to your practice web pages,
like graphics, buttons, backgrounds, etc.
Keep in mind that overloading your site
with those wonderfully cute graphics only
makes the page load that much slower.
Visit How to Lose Your Web Viewers and
learn that for every 10 seconds it takes
for your graphics to load before your
page contents can be seen, you risk
losing 20 percent of your remaining
viewers.
http://www.delphi.com/pubweb/gg2.html
An excellent spot to
look for graphics is The Clip Art
Connection, where the graphics are
divided into categories and themes, which
makes it much easier to find what you
want.
http://www.ist.net/clipart/themespc.html
When building your
site, save the main page (home page) as
"index.html." From there, name
your other pages based on their content.
Be sure to provide a link from your main
page to each of the other pages.
You have your beginning
site, so now you need to actually put
your masterpiece on the Web for the world
to see. Many service providers offer free
website space as part of their monthly
service. Check with your Internet service
provider to see if they provide free
space and exactly what you need to do to
upload your site. If your service
provider doesn't offer free space, check
with Geocities. Geocities even provides a
File Manager Utility program for creating
a website.
http://www.geocities.com/
After you learn the
procedures for uploading your site to the
Web, you'll need a good FTP program to
upload the pages. Back at Stroud's,
search for CuteFTP, which is one of the
best File Transfer Protocol clients
available on the market.
http://cws.internet.com/32ftp.html#cuteftp
Hopefully, this will
get you off and running with your own
website. Of course, when building a site,
there are many other considerations that
you will want to address later, such as
the importance of META tags, how to add
CGI scripts for guestbooks/counters, how
to use frames and tables, and much more.
But all of that comes with experience
(and, in my case, the help of a few very
good friends!).
We'll close with an
article titled, How to Publicize a
Website by Richard Seltzer, which
outlines ways to promote your site.
http://www.samizdat.com/public.html
Brought
to you by: World Wide Information Outlet
- http://certificate.net/wwio/, your
source of FREEWare Content online.
Robin
Nobles is a
freelance writer whose articles on
surfing the Web are published in six
newspapers regularly. She also writes
articles about the Web and Internet in
publications such as Internet Newsroom,
InfoAlert, WebVantage, CompuNotes,
ChipNET, The Sunshine Post, Bridges
Initiatives, and more. She can be reached
at robin@robinsnest.com or through
her website: Robin's Nest
for Writers and Web Surfers -
http://www.robinsnest.com/
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