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| Your First Website
| By:
Graham Taylor | |
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When you are ready to set up your first website, how do you start?
first lets consider what the site is for
a hobby
a family
a business
If the site is for your family or a hobby, you probably dont want the expense of buying your own top level domain name.
There are many companies offering free hosting, and a search here will return more than 200,000,000 results.
What you get with most free hosting sites is a subdomain this means your domain name will be something like
yoursite.freehost.com
you will probably also have some form of advertising, most likely a banner shown on your site which will help to pay the company for providing the hosting.
If your site is for a business you will want your own top level domain name which will look like
yoursite.com
this will put you in total control of what is shown on your site.
When you are choosing a name try to find one that is relevant to what your site is about, this will be important later, the name should also b as short as possible, espescially if you are going to have to repeatedly type the name.
If you are going to promote a business think carefully about the name, does the name decribe the business, for example when I decided on the name for this site I incorperated the the words "business" and "opportunity" so that the name would be more visible to search engines. I also use those words in my key words meta tags. Make a list of names that you like as it is probable that your first choice is already taken, also consider changing the .com to an alternative.
these are examples that are in use .com .net .org .biz .info .co.uk .org.uk .us .ca .tv .eu
By choosing alternative extentions you might find the name you want is available.
To help keep costs down it is worth considering another type of free hosting package this type gives you an advert free 100mb account when you register your domain name with them, click Doteasy.com
If you want a host that provides support for mySLQ, perl,CGI, and other technical specifications you will see prices like these
Domain Avenue $35.00 + FREE web hosting = $35.00
Go Daddy $8.95 + 12 x $8.95/mo = $116.35
Register.com $35.00 + 12 x $19.95/mo = $274.40
Verio $19.00 + 12 x $24.95/mo = $318.40
Value Web $35.00 + 12 x $19.95/mo = $274.40
Network Solutions $29.00 with NO hosting = $29.00
Domain Direct $24.99 with NO hosting = $24.99
Enom $29.95 with NO hosting = $29.95
Prices are from official web sites on 12-Mar-2002.
I recomend that you have a look at the page on hosting before making a decision
Once you have your domain name, and your hosting what are you going to put on your site?
The first page that you need is called your home page, and you call it index.html. html is short for hypertext markup language. and is the code that tell your browser what to display. Html is a relatively easy language to learn, but fortunately you dont have to because there are editors available that convert what you put on your page into the correct code for your browser.
The most common what you see is what you get (wysiwyg) editor is microsofts frontpage, which is very good, but unless your host supports frontpage extensions creates problems by adding non standard code.
Free wysiwyg editors available from
eversoft
trellian.com
Things to consider when you are designing your site.
Neat and Easy Navigation:
Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining how long your visitor stays and explores your site.. Ask yourself What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them.
Clean Layout Design:
A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site's looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use a template for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
Optimise Load Time:
Make sure your load time is low. For this you must: Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size. Optimize your HTML and script code: Make sure that your site doesn't't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Allow for all Screen Resolutions:
A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn't look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site. .
Multi Browser Compatible:
Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox , Opera and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.
Once you have designed and tested your site you will need to upload the files to your host and to do this you will need to use a ftp program. This means File Transfer Protocol and they are very easy to use
you can get filezila here
http://filezilla-project.org
My last piece of advice is to not worry, if you dont like what you have done you can edit over and over again untill you are happy with the result.
Graham Taylor recommends building your list by giving a way a rebrandable PDF report called "Fast Easy Traffic Machine" the report comes complete with followup letters and squeeze page
Get your copy at
http://www.protrackerplus.com/1421/fetmgot.html |
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