Getting Yourself a Web Site Parts 1-3

This article is mainly the brainchild of one of our customers, Roger from Lavender Pathways. Not being in any way a computer or web guru, Roger had been through all the pain of organising a web site from scratch. He therefore suggested to me that other customers might benefit from being able to read about some of the basic questions that occur to someone who knows little or nothing about the web, but who wants to organise a personal or business web page.

I agreed. I am especially grateful to Roger for supplying me with the questions he faced as he worked through the issues. These are really valuable because they're authentic. They're questions from a layperson which, when answered, are much more likely to be helpful to other laypeople than questions I think up and hope might be helpful.

There are quite a few of them, and too many for one article, so I'll start with the first few this month, and carry on in subsequent months. The first months set of questions will be like an overview. IN subsequent months we'll get more specific about things.

Question 1: What is HTML?

HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. Its the name of the type of code used to make most web pages. It may sound complicated but it really isn't at all. The "hypertext" just refers to stuff online that you can click on to get other stuff - in other words, web pages. "Mark-up" simply refers to written instructions about how words or images are to be displayed. The good thing about HTML is that you don't need to learn any programming languages to create something decent. The "code" used is just abbreviated English and commonsense. "Language" just means that there are rules about how you have to write the code. You do need to do things a certain way, but as I have stated, the concepts are reasonably simple. It would take the average person less than five minutes to understand how to create a few lines of text in the size, colour and font of their choice. Five minutes more and they would be able to place images on the page. Five minutes more and creating basic links would be a snap.

Question 2: Is it possible for a layperson like me to set up an Internet website?

Yes, it is quite possible for someone who knows nothing about web sites to quickly learn enough HTML to make a basic site. The basic concepts are very easy to understand and no specialised tools are needed. I have dealt with this question before so I won't go into too much detail yet about how HTML code actually works. Two articles are Your Personal Actrix Web Space and What is All This HTML Stuff? Of course, the Internet itself abounds with free and simple tutorials. Any search engine will produce a long list of sites to try.

A lot is going to depend on the individual and how much time and inclination they have. Different people will catch on quicker than others. Once the creative bug is caught, there can be no stopping some people. Others may give it a try and decide it isn't worth the bother. During my time on the help desk I have watched several people develop sites from scratch. At first they need a little help or a few pointers. Before long they're doing amazing things.

Question 3: Website design seems a complicated procedure. Is it?

This question follows nicely on from the one above. Web design is as complicated as you want it to be. A simple site containing text and some images and links is dead easy. Animations, things popping up, things that change when you mouse-over them - these aspects are a little more complicated. You would need special and expensive software for some of the more complicated things, but a good, functional web site does not need to be that complicated and could be created just using Microsoft Notepad.

Question 4: How do I get my website onto the Internet?

Once you have a site designed (and we'll deal with design issues a lot more in later questions) you need to organise a domain name for yourself and some hosting space. Your ISP can step you through these procedures. They will rent you some space on their servers for a monthly fee (Actrix currently charges $12.50/month for a small to medium sized site) and they can secure a domain name for you. As part of the service they will take care of all the technical business that makes your site come up when someone types your domain name into their browser. You don't even need to bother with understanding how all that works.

As far as getting the site up onto your ISP's server so that the world can get to it - another piece of cake. The process to achieve this is called FTP. You can download free FTP programs that are easy to use. Most of them resemble Windows Explorer. They connect to your site and list all the files that are currently there, if any. You just select the files you've created that you want to upload to your site, and up they go. Your ISP will give you the user name and password for your site so you can tell your FTP program how to connect. You can also use your FTP program to delete files, change their names, and so forth.

Question 5: What is a domain name?

A domain name is a web address such as actrix.co.nz. Most domain names are used with a www. in front of them. The domain name system in New Zealand is maintained by the Domain Names Commissioner. You can visit the site of the Office of the Domain Names Commissioner at www.dnc.org.nz where there is a search tool that lets you see whether the domain name you want is available. If it is, contact us and we can register it on your behalf. Once that's done, no one else can use it but you. You can register a domain and not use it if you want. Some people do this to safeguard a domain name for themselves for future use. As mentioned above, once you have your domain name registered, Actrix can take care of making sure it points to your web site or we can just hold it for you on your behalf. You can also begin using your domain name as your e-mail address and you don't have to set up a web site first in order to do this. Our help desk can talk you through setting this up in your e-mail program. It won't take long. With Actrix (and our rates are hard to beat) a domain name will cost you $79.95 in the first year, and $44.95/year after that.

Question 6: I hear about programs like Microsoft's FrontPage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Will I need to buy software like that to create a web page?

Programs like these can be really helpful because they allow you to design your page by dragging and dropping stuff and they automatically create the HTML for you behind the scenes. They are very expensive (though FrontPage comes free with Microsoft Office 2000 Premium), and they have problems of their own. Sometimes they think they're smarter than you are and will re-arrange things their way, and it can be very hard to boss them back into doing things the way you wanted them to. There are cheaper alternatives to FrontPage and Dreamweaver, and you can download lots of them from the Net on a free trial basis before you buy. Coffeecup HTML Editor, for example (and this is one of the cheaper alternatives I'd recommend), has a free 45 day trial version, and eventually will cost you just $49 US. It is just over 6 Megabytes to download.

If you're planning on practicing and getting better at web design then I would recommend against them, at least at first. HTML files are just text files, so you can create web pages using just Notepad. By having to create everything from scratch all by yourself you get a much better grounding in the fundamentals. Later on you can try am automatic HTML editor, and you'll know enough not to let it get the upper hand on you. That's just my opinion, though. Lots of designers started out with the auto-editors.

Question 7: Can you summarise the main costs involved in getting a web site going?

There are three general aspects to a simple web site and we've dealt with each above. Firstly there's the content or the pages that you've made or that you've arranged for someone to make for you. Secondly there's the domain that we've just talked about. Actrix can register this for you and make sure that it is properly "advertised" on the Internet so that people anywhere in the world can type your address into their browsers and have your site come up. The third aspect is simply the space on our servers that you need to lease on a monthly basis. As stated, enough for a simple site (up to five megabytes in size which is usually ample) is not overly expensive.

Costs:

Domain name:
Web Hosting:
Web Design:

$79.95 the first year. $44.95/year thereafter.
$12.50/month A little more if you have hundreds of images or need more than 5 Megabytes of space
Free if you can do it yourself.

A link is something on your web page, usually some text or an image, that, when clicked with a mouse, will cause the visitor's browser go and visit another page. Links can be external or internal. External links go to another site other than your own. Internal links call up another document from within your own site. Links are very simple to set up and both internal and external links work in pretty much the same way. To create links, all you need to do is put a little bit of text code in front of the words or image, and a little bit after the words or image. As stated, these articles won't go into too much detail about how to actually do the coding. There are plenty of tutorials around online for that. Have a look at the image here, though, to see just how easy it is to create a link. There are other things you can do to tell browsers how to display the link, whether to underline it, or display it in a different colour, etc.

Question 9: If I want to change something in my website once it is on the Internet, what do I do?

When you create web pages, you should save them on your hard drive somewhere so that you can find them in case you need to edit them. You make the changes to the text or coding of your web site page (s), and then save on your hard drive again. Last month I explained briefly what FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is. Use your FTP program to upload the altered files up to your site. At first it's always a buzz to visit your site online, upload a changed page, and then click refresh and watch the information change in real time. FTP is very simple to use. Moving pages up to your web site is pretty much just like moving files around on your hard drive using Windows Explorer.

Backing up your pages is often a good idea. Once you've finished your site, save all the files in the one directory. Save changed files in a different directory. That way if you make a mistake you can't quickly fix and you need to put the original file back, you can do so by uploading the original again from your first directory. Another idea might be to create a spare directory within your web site and put your original files there for safekeeping.

Not really. Macintosh, Microsoft and Unix based browsers all interpret HTML in pretty much the same way, so you don't need to worry about, for example, Macintosh computers being able to see your web site if you designed it on a PC. However, there are some minor issues arising from the fact that different browsers will occasionally interpret HTML in slightly different ways. Netscape and Opera, for example, will usually be a little more fussy that Internet Explorer, but he changes are not usually significant enough for you to worry about. Conscientious designers always check out how their sites look in all the major browsers and they tweak their code to make it look the same in them all. However, if this seems like too much of a hassle, then just design for Internet Explorer which is what 95% of web surfers use. By this I mean check your site out online using IE. If it looks okay for you, it will look okay for others using IE, and that's most people.

The only other thing to consider is that different people have different screen resolutions. Most will either have their resolutions set to 800 x 600 pixels or 1024 x 768 pixels. If you design using a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, visitors with 800 x 600 screen resolutions may experience your page in a squashed way. It's a good idea, then, to design your pages mak9ng sure any tables you use are set to 800 pixels wide. If you're just using simple text and images, it's not really a concern as the browser will always wrap your text and images so that they fit properly for the visitor's browser settings.

Well this, of course, will vary depending on what sort of site you have. if it's a business site, you want to make sure that visitors can always find out how to get to your order page, or to your page about your products. Therefore, the most essential thing you should have on every single page is a menu of all the pages you have so that a visitor can find his or her way to any section of your website at any time. It is also a good idea to put this menu in the same place on every page so that a visitor knows exactly what to click to get to the section they want. Online you're probably competing with other businesses or similar sites, and you can be sure people will move on to somewhere else quickly if they don't know how to find their way around your site.

Norrie the Actrix Nerd tried to stick to this principle when he created his site at http://users.actrix.co.nz/norrie/. You'll see that in most cases the links are all in the same position on all of the pages, and that you can get to any other section from anywhere in the site by clicking one of his handsome heads over on the left. Each page also contains a link back to home, or the opening page for his site. It's a reasonable example, though the HTML is nothing advanced or complicated. Also, you'll notice that some of the links don't work anymore. Ideally Norrie should take those down. I'll mention this to him when he returns from his current stint advising the WTO on technical matters.

Other essential information, of course, would include contact information such as your business telephone number for orders. Most sites also include an e-mail address, though this will make you a target for Spam eventually. It's up to you to work out whether that's a price you want to pay.

Question 12: I note that my Microsoft Word program has a "Save as HTML" or "Save as Web Page" function under the File menu. Is using this a good idea?

Here I am less than enthusiastic. In most cases, doing this will lead to more trouble than it's worth. Indeed, Word will turn a page of text into an HTML document. However, as soon as you include images, the whole process becomes much more complicated. Word will automatically create image links to other directories that it assumes you will have set up. Those looking for a quick solution are going to find that they still need to know a fair bit about HTML in order to get anything more than a text document to work. Also, Word will bloat your HTML document incredibly. I created a test document in Word that was one line of text and one image. This should have come to around 4-5 short lines of code or less. The HTML document created by Word contained 149 long lines of code. Almost all of it appeared to be unnecessary rubbish. The problem with this, is, of course, that your document becomes unnecessarily large and takes much longer to download.

There are a number of ways to get images. Firstly, you can download them from the web. Do a search for free images at Google or a similar search engine. You'll find lots of clip art and background archives that people will let you use for nothing. Secondly, you can take photos with a digital camera, or use a scanner to get electronic copies of photos you already have. Lastly, you can use a graphics program such as PhotoShop, Image Composer or PaintShop to create your own. There are free trial graphics programs that you can download and use, and in most cases, some form of editing software will come with the digital camera you purchase.

Question 14: What do I need to remember when making or coming up with images?

The most common mistake people make with images when starting out is that they are just too big in terms of file size. Any image on your website should not be much bigger than 20 or 30 kilobytes. A 20 kilobyte image could take between five and 10 seconds to download via visitor's 56K modem. If you have several of these on a page, the page could take too long to download and your visitors' interest will be lost.

Two ways to reduce the file size of an image are firstly to reduce its geographical size. In other words, reduce it from being 500 x 300 pixels down to 250 x 150 pixels. Secondly, use compression when you save the image. The most popular form of image on the web is the JPEG. This is a compressed image that reduces file size whilst minimising loss to picture quality. Most graphics programs will allow you to set the level of compression when you save as a JPEG. The more you compress, the more the picture deteriorates, but a happy medium can usually be reached.

Question 15: Is there a limit to the amount of web sites one can have, and the content that is used in them?

The short answer to this is no. You can have as many web sites as you have time for and can pay for. Of course, most web hosting fees are charged by the megabyte, so a bigger site may mean you have to rent more space from your ISP for the hosting of your images and pages. The Internet is wonderfully unregulated, so there is no central group or body anywhere monitoring who has how many web sites and nobody (other than your ISP, perhaps) has set any limits in terms of how many you can have or how big they can be.

Question 16: Can I copyright my web site?

Sure you can, at least as far as its content goes. My understanding of intellectual property rights is pretty rudimentary, but I think that anything you write and publish in New Zealand is automatically copyrighted. This means that any original content you put on your web site belongs to you, and it is illegal (at least in New Zealand) for anyone else to take that content and use it themselves without your permission. It would be a good idea (if you're concerned about it enough) to put a copyright warning on your page reminding people that they shouldn't steal your stuff, but you don't need to have such a warning in order to have copyright over what you write and design.

The problem is going to be with enforcing your copyright. It is likely that not all countries have the same copyright laws as we do, and if someone in Hungary copied your information onto their web site, I don't like your chances of getting much help from their local police.

There's not much you can do in real terms to stop people copying and pasting from your site or printing your pages out. That's the risk you take when you publish web pages. You can add special code to make it so that people can't right-click and save your images, but anyone with a little web-savvy will be able to get past that, and they can always use a freely downloadable screenshot catcher program anyway, so I wouldn't bother.

Question 17: What legal issues surround setting up a web site?

I think it's probably safe to say that the development of legal laws specifically for the Internet is a process that is still in its infancy. That is not to say, however, that laws don't apply. As a general rule, they do. Copyright laws are a case in point. It is illegal to offer copyrighted material e.g. images, copyrighted music files etc, at your web site without permission from the copyright holder. You also cannot display images that are considered illegal in any other media, such as child pornography or other content banned for reasons of indecency. As yet, however, there is no legal requirement to offer warnings about your pages if they contain material within the bounds of adult content deemed acceptable to non-minors. Trademark infringement would be another case in point. You can't use logos or colour schemes from other businesses as if they were your own.

Recognised brands in domain names is not on. You wouldn't get away with registering mcdonalds.co.nz for example and using it to sell your own hamburgers, even if you changed your surname to McDonald. Cybersquatting is another interesting case in point. Some people tried to register domain names that would be sought after by big companies or music stars, in the hopes that they would be able to sell them to the company or star for lots of money at a later stage. In New Zealand you can't get away with this sort of thing, and you'd be forced to hand the name over unless you could prove that you had an established right to the name yourself at the time that you registered it.

The Consumer Guarantees Act also applies to your online content. You can't advertise falsely online and get away with it just because you're on the Internet. Product right-of-return laws all still apply just as they would for any other business advertising and selling goods in other ways. There are also laws about credit card transactions and your legal requirements to establish that the person using the card is legitimate. These apply just as much online as they do to supermarkets and other non-online vendors.

These are all issues that you would want to investigate and be careful about before you started conducting business online, and you'd be well-advised to conduct your own research beyond the general coverage given here.

Question 18: Is there a place for the small business or personal web site without being blitzed by the big boys?

Yes, of course there is, but the reality of the situation is that it is going to be harder for you to get recognised if you're in an industry that's dominated by big players. Companies with money are going to be able to pay search engines for "sponsored links" that will display more prominently in web searches, or they're going to hire crackerjack web designers to provide them with amazing sites that you could never compete with on a small budget. The reality is that things usually come down to money in the end.

There are some things you can do, though. My first suggestion would be to register your site with lots of search engines. Actrix has a service, for example, where you can be registered with around 1400 search engines for the fee of $29.95. But if you have the time, visit as many search engines as you can and look for their submit feature. You should especially register your site at New Zealand search engines such as NZSearch and SearchNZ. If you operate a plumbing business or pizza delivery business, it is less likely that people are going to search for your type of service on an international search engine such as Google. You have a better chance of being returned near the top of a search at a local search engine site.

Many local communities or suburbs have their own web sites. Some examples would include www.wainuiomata.co.nz, www.stokesvalley.co.nz, and www.wairarapa.co.nz. If you're running a business I would seriously recommend contacting such sites (webmaster@whateverthesiteis.co.nz will usually work if there isn't a contact page) to ask about the possibility of advertising. You're better off getting your name out in front of people who would probably be predisposed to using the services of someone local. My impression is that people are still woefully ignorant of the types of services they can find and use over the Internet, but this will change with time and is changing (it won't happen overnight, but it will happen). The more businesses that advertise their services online to their local communities, the faster that change will be!

One more thing that should be mentioned here is the use of good meta tags. Meta tags are just simple pieces of code that you can add to the headers of your web pages that contain a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your site. They would include your business name, your locality and the sorts of things you do or products and services you supply. Search engines will use your meta tags when they serve your site up at someone's web search. Even if you don't register your pages, search engines will usually find you by means of the robots they send out to trawl the web following links and reporting back on the pages they find. You can also use meta tags to provide a short description of your site which the search engine will also dish up for the searcher when they search on a keyword associated with your site. Again, the Internet abounds with information about how to use and write good meta tags.

Question 19: What are some more design issues I should be thinking about?

We mentioned a couple of these already in answering Question 11. Make sure your information is easy to follow and that there are plenty of links on each of your pages to all your other sections. Ideally, these links should be in roughly the same place on each page. If visitors quickly become bored or lost at your web site, they will move on without much of a second thought.

Many pages on the web are confusing or unclear in terms of how to find stuff. Common mistakes to avoid are overwhelming the visitor with too much information all at once. Make your opening page reasonably simple with just a paragraph or two about what your site is all about. Then provide links to other pages. Visitors should understand pretty much what those links are about after reading your introductory paragraphs.

Think to yourself about what exactly you want visitors to do, and then make it very easy for them to do just that. Lead them to your products page like a horse to water if you can. Don't cram any page with so much information that the visual senses just can't take it all in. If there's too much information there and it isn't clear what's important and what's not, then most visitors will move on to a page they can more speedily make sense of.

One good idea might be to explore by surfing around the web for a while. Look at pages you like and understand, and think about what made those pages work well for you. Try to duplicate those processes in the pages you are designing. You might also find all sorts of interesting design ideas while you're there.

Keep it simple. It's tempting, when you're starting out, to try to impress visitors with extra bells and whistles. Think about a colour-scheme before hand that includes no more than three or four well matched colours. Too many colours will sometimes come across as an assault upon the senses, and may well make your page look quite amateurish. (An excellent colour page can be found here.) Similar principles apply to fonts. My advice is not to use too many different ones. Usually, the simpler things are, the easier they are on the eye.

It could come down to personal preference but one other thing I advise you to avoid is the providing of music. You can add scripts to your site that will cause music to play while someone is logged into it. While this may seem like an impressive idea at first, it usually involves large sound files that would have to download onto the visitor's computer, and I have yet to come across anyone who ever found music at a web site anything but an annoyance. As a friend of mine recently stated: "I'm surfing the web. I don't want to feel like I'm in an elevator!"

Question 20: Is there any way for me to get an idea of how many and what sorts of people have visited my site?

Yes, there is. Most ISPs, and certainly Actrix, will give you a place that you can log into to find out statistics about your site organised by month or day. The sort of information available to you comes in graphs and charts that reveal how many unique visitors you've had, the most popular page links they clicked on, where in the world they were when they were accessing your site, and so forth. This can be very useful for gaining an idea of how successful certain aspects of your site are. No specific personal knowledge about visitors can be gained, however.

Question 21: What can Actrix do to help me set up a web site?

Well, we'll certainly give you lots of encouragement, and I am happy to answer brief or general questions. You may also find a couple of the help desk staff willing to give you suggestions and a bit of quick trouble-shooting. However, sorting out html problems, why images won't load, etc, can be a very time consuming process, and it is really beyond the job description of the help desk. I guess our approach is that we'll assist you to find answers to your html problems, but we can't really solve them for you. That's part of your learning process.

When it comes to explaining how your domain and e-mail will work, you'll find our sales representatives all ears and helpfulness.

Of course, we do provide you with some free web space on our servers at which you can put up your own personal content. Each and every Actrix customer is entitled to that. We provide you with an upload web page that you can log into so that you can put your pages up without having to worry about FTP (see Question 4), but this is for personal web space only, and won't work with a domain named web site. You can find out more about user home pages at http://www.actrix.co.nz/domestic/userhomepages.php. Because this is an Actrix service that everyone is entitled to use, our help desk will gladly assist you with how to make the system work if you are confused by the instruction page.

Lastly, Actrix does provide a web design service where we can design pages for you. We have various packages and options available starting at $599.00. You can find out more about Actrix Web Services at http://webservices.actrix.co.nz/.