Comments on learning how to build a web-site
| Register a domain name | Some Registrars take the name you've submitted and register it in their own name. They then 'lease' you the name. Find a Registrar that registers the name to you. I use "Go Daddy." A friend of mine told me about them. I've been using them for a couple of years now and am very pleased with their products and service. My wife and I have four hosting accounts with them. I have between ten and twenty domain names registered to me. |
| Get a hosting service | Again, i went with Go Daddy. This was recommended to me be several people. Go Daddy has three basic levels of hosting. The cheapest is $4 per month. The middle is $7 per month and the premium is $15 per month. All my hosting accounts use the middle one. I also use Linux servers. (One of my hosting plans uses windows. I'm thinking of calling Go Daddy and having this changed over to Linux). |
| Get web-building software | First, you don't need any "web-building software." You can do everything in a text editor. There are "free" packages out there. I tend not to trust anything "free." (unless i know the motive of who is giving it). I went out and bought Dreamweaver software after talking to many people about what i should do. Like i said, and will continue to re-iterate, this whole thing is a learning experience for me. Check out my "Quotes" page. George Bernard Shaw said "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." Dreamweaver is about a $400 software package but it gives you everything you need. It has templates that can get you started quickly. I didn't use the templates. (You can tell). |
| Build a front page. Call it index.htm or index.html | I didn't realize that the front page needed to be called this. (At least on the Go Daddy system). I named it something else and tried to get it working. I called customer service, (like i said, Go Daddy has excellent customer service), and they very politely suggested i rename my home page. I did, it worked, the rest is history. (If i were female, would it be herstory????) |
| Link your computer and your software to the remote server | Somehow, you have to get the pages you build onto the server that stores your web-site. This is done with FTP software (At least this is how mine is done). FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Dreamweaver has all of this included in the package. There are some free FTP packages out there. You can certainly avoid the purchase of Dreamweaver by buying a book on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and building your own pages in a text editor. You can then get a free FTP package and upload your pages that way. Some free FTP packages: Tucows, CoffeCup, FileZilla, SmartFTP |
| Contact us page | Wow. This one took me way too long to figure out. It turns out that Go Daddy has a specific method for a contact us page. They have a cgi script that must be used. The best thing to do is to go to the Go Daddy web site (or the web site of whatever hosting service you are using) and follow the instructions. I had to build a form and put buttons on the form. I had to learn how to attach certain actions to these buttons. After i did all this, i couldn't figure out how Go Daddy knew to send the information to a specific place. As it turns out, i had to set the email address in my account information on the server. They do this so that the email address won't show up anywhere in the HTML of that page (so that search engine robots won't find the email address). |
| Lots of coloured backgrounds is a sign of an amateur | Oops! It was fun though. It is amazing how different all the colours and fonts look on different screens. The colours on my site are fine on my machine. I've seen the colours on some CRTs and they look horrible. |
| Tabs don't exist in HTML | When building web-pages, tabs don't exist. Also, multiple spaces don't exist (unless you force them to exist in the code). In order to maintain columnar spacing, you have to use tables. You can always make the table border 0 thickness so that it doesn't show up on the page. |
| The same page shows up differently in different browsers | I have Firefox and Safari and IE loaded on my machine. Sometimes, the same page looks different on all three. You should check your work with as many different browser types as you have. For example, my front page has a table that has four equally spaced columns. For some reason, Internet Explorer changes the sizes of these columns and the middle left is larger than the middle right. No other browser does this. Go figure. |
| Fonts | Not all machines have all fonts. I found a really cool looking font called Zapfino and i made a title using this. It looked great on my machine. Then when i went to some other machines, Zapfino, evidently, was not loaded. The font that displayed was plain. Now i'm figuring out why some web page builders simply put all the stuff in a jpeg. |
| Superscript | For my Chuck Norris jokes, i needed to learn how to make a superscript. (For E=MC2 ) I couldn't figure out how to do this directly from Dreamweaver. I looked at the code of a web page and found that <sup>2</sup> would do it. I'm not sure why this isn't in the help of Dreamweaver or why it doesn't appear to be an available option. So, it appears that some things simply have to be done in the HTML code. |
| Quicktime | Mac computers are great. I videotaped my daughter singing a song at the school. I connected my camcorder (miniDV) to my Mac laptop and loaded the clip into iMovie. I exported the clip as a Quicktime format for web. Then i added a hyperlink to my daughters page and pointed the link to the Quicktime clip. |
| Special Fonts | If you look on my "read what people are saying" page, you'll find three Slovenian sayings. When i first uploaded them to the web-server, the fonts were not recognized. This got me to thinking that, even if they were recognized, some computers might not be able to read them. So, i captured them as .tiff images and then converted them to .jpeg. All browsers will read .jpeg files as simply pictures. |
Eric Stromberg