from the October 2003 Newsletter
by Rob Zorn

This series of articles 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.

Last month we dealt with seven introductory questions that attempted to provide an overview of what's involved with getting a website online from scratch. Now we can begin to deal with some of the specifics.

Question 8: What are "links" and how do they work?

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.

Question 10: Are there formats to consider?

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.

Question 11: What essential information do I need on my web site?

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.

Question 13: Where can I get images for my web site from?

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.

Stay tuned next month for the next seven questions.

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