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How To Create A Web Site

1. Decide on Your Content

Before actually beginning to create your web site, it is absolutely essential to decide what kind of information you want on it. Look around at other web sites for ideas. You'll waste a lot of time if you start creating the web site before deciding what you want on it. It sounds like good judgment, but it's a very common mistake. Just surf the web a little bit, and you'll find gobs of sites that seem to have no apparent purpose. Don't let yours be one of them.

2. Learn HTML

HTML is incredibly easy to learn. Don't let anyone scare you away. It's not a programming language at all. It's simply text-formatting. In a nutshell, that means that you simply put tags around text you want to look different, and add separate tags to add images.

For example: If you want text to be bold, you'd put a <b> tag where you want the bold text to begin and then a </b> where you want the bold text to stop. Like this: Here is some text. <b>Here is some bold text.</b> Here is more text, but it is not bold. On your actual web page, you would not see the formatting tags!

You've probably heard about programs that help you to compose your web pages, such as Microsoft's FrontPage. However, you don't necessarily need a program like these. You can create equally good (or better!) web pages in Notepad (Windows) or SimpleText (Mac). In fact, that's really all you need, and for most people, it's just as easy as a special program. That's the way I write pages, because they're much simpler, and you can see exactly what your page has on it. If you do decide to use a special program, I recommend learning basic HTML anyway. Sooner or later, you'll find that you need to do something to your page that you can't do in your editor.

For all of my web pages, I primarily use a program called Notepad++. It's a free program. You can download it from the following website:

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

While Notepad++ is a replacement program for the Notepad program that comes with Windows, it is also a great editor for web pages. You can use the program's "Style Configurator" to configure the program to assist you with HTML. It does this by using different colors and styles (bold, italics, etc.) to highlight the various tags and attributes of HTML.

You can also use Windows Notepad or 1st Page 2000 from Evrsoft. The best part about 1st Page 2000: It's another free program!!!! You can download a copy from their web site at http://www.evrsoft.com

Anyhow, the best advice I can give about learning HTML is to surf the Web. There are countless sites that can help you. Here are some links to get you started.
The other best advice I can give you is to look at what other people have done and use it as a backbone for your own work. Almost everyone has done this, and it's really a great way to learn. The way to do this is to open the page and then click on View and look in the drop-down menu for source. This shows you the actual HTML tags that the author used to construct the page. You can copy information from here into other programs.

Although you can, under no circumstances would I recommend using Microsoft Word to create your document! Why not? First of all, if you save the document as a Word document (with the default file extension of .doc), your web browser will not display the page at all! Just changing the file extension from .doc to .htm or .html will not fix the format. If you insist in using Microsoft Word, be sure to save the file as a web page or an html document. However, if you do this and then look at the file, you will see an almost incomprehensible document, especially if you use Word 2000 or Word 2003. Save yourself some grief - use either Notepad or 1st Page 2000! You won't regret it later when you have to modify your web page(s) - and you will modify them sometime in the near future!!

If you want a book to help you in writing your HTML, I strongly recommend HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide published by O'Reilly - one of the foremost publishers of computer books. This book is easy to understand, even if you have absolutely no knowledge of HTML.

The best part of this book in the extensive listing in the back of all the HTML tags and their attributes. This listing then goes one step further and tells you if the attribute is applicable to Netscape, Internet Explorer, or both. That way if you use the attribute on your web site, you'll know if it works with your favorite browser.

3. Design Your Pages (A Quick Style Guide)

There are thousands of style guides scattered throughout the web. I'd be surprised if you haven't run into any already. This quick guide consists of a couple of tips that I think are the most important things to remember when designing web pages.

Make it Clear. The best web pages are those that have a definite purpose. It's best to decide what you want on your site before you create it. After you've decided that, you just need to make your site easy for people to look at and understand. Some tips are:
Make it Small. If someone can't download your entire page in less than 30 seconds or so, chances are they won't wait for the rest of it. (And remember, not all web surfers have a high-speed internet connection!!) Here's some ways to keep your pages small and make them download faster.
And to quote Jeff Glover (web site no longer online!)

"I encourage you to create your web site however you want, regardless of what some doofus says is "sucky" or "a don't"! ... Good design is a matter of YOUR personal taste and style, not someone else's! Rules are meant to be broken. I should know... I've broken a few of my own!"

Web Site Navigation. Web sites have grown in size (some to the extent they contain hundreds or thousands of pages!). So how do you navigate the many pages on a web site?

Years ago, it was popular to have site maps. These are maps of how your site is laid out and how the pages link together. While these have declined lately in favor of navigation menus, you could build a site map.

More popular these days is some type of navigation menu. These may be on the top or left side of each page on the web site. There are literally hundreds of types of navigation menus – from the very simple to the very complex which may include fancy graphics. The good news is there are numerous programs out there that will create menus for you. Some are free and some you can download for a trial period and then you must purchase a license. My recommendation: Take a look at them and find one that fits the style of your web site. You can find menu programs by doing a search for 'navigation menu' from your favorite search engine.

Test your pages. What's that I just said? TEST YOUR PAGES. There's nothing more frustrating to your web site visitor than to find one or more pages that have some of the following errors (more about how to avoid these errors later):
One thing I have noticed is if the computer hosting your web site is running UNIX (which is quite common), the following filenames are NOT the same:

index.html
INDEX.HTML
Index.Html

To UNIX, a capital (upper case) letter is different than a lower case letter. Since you may not know what language the computer hosting your web site uses, set up a "style" and follow it! For example, I try to use only small letters (lower case) for my page filenames. When I use photos, I try to limit the photo filename to not more than seven lower case characters. If the photo has an associated thumbnail, I add a small "t" to the filename so I can recognize it as a thumbnail and know which full-size photo the thumbnail is associated with.

4. The Next Steps Most people creating web pages would think the next steps would be to upload your pages to your web host. Not just yet! Before uploading your pages, there are some things you need to check.
5. Upload Your Pages

OK, so you've validated your HTML and checked your links (and fixed any problems). Now what?

You are now ready to upload your pages. To do this, you'll need to FTP your files to your web site server. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is one of the many ways to transfer information over the net. It's quite often used for downloading software and uploading files (or at least, that's what you'll use it most for). There are many ways to do this, the easiest is with a graphical front-end. The one I use (it's for Windows) is FileZilla. It is a free FTP program available by clicking on the following link:

http://filezilla-project.org/

There are two other (currently) free FTP programs: Although I have not used the above two programs, from the descriptions and screenshots on their respective websites, FileZilla appears to be the easiest to use!

About Mac FTP programs (I use Windows), here's a web site with several Mac programs listed: http://www.softwarearchives.com/macintosh/ (search for "FTP" without the quotes).

6. Keep It Current

One of the main reasons to have a web page is to distribute information very quickly. A static web page is a dead page. Update yours every time something happens. One thing you don't want your web site visitors to see is an outdated calendar or events listing!

7. The End

That should be all you need to know to get started. If you have any questions, try looking around on the web for answers. I found every link on this page using a search engine. There's lots of good material out there, and it's not hard to find.

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My thanks to BSA.net (not affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America!)
for the initial concepts contained herein.
I've taken their thoughts and both expanded them and updated them.

Questions?

This page last updated: January 11, 2009