Website Design
Every one has a website these days, from a simple one web page
website to the most complicated, and many are actually worth visiting.
If you want your website to be
one
of
those,
there
are a
few simple
things to look out for.
The quickest and easiest answer is get in touch with us!
But seriously folks, most ISP accounts give a certain amount of webspace
free to users, all you have to do is fill it. Alternatively, we can
highly recommend Donhost
as a top quality UK host. They are not the cheapest, but if you want
to make sure your site stays up, they are in our estimation, the best
bar none.
There are a very large number of programs available which claim to
make website creation easy. The problem is we have all seen what some
people create with these programs! The first rule of website creation
is 'Keep it simple'. This doesn't mean that the design is simple,
just
that it is obvious what the visitor to the site has to do to get what
they want. Increasingly you will come across animated sites created
with the Flash program. Some of these enhance the visit, whilst others
seem to be a triumph of design over content, and just get in the way.
If you do want to learn Flash, there are often magazine cover mounted
CD's with a demo version for you to try. Macromedia
Flash itself
can be daunting to start off, and it may well be that you do not need
all
the facilities it offers. There are other programs such as Swish, one
of our favourites, which offer all the functions you are likely to
use for considerably less cost.
There is not space here to go into a full HTML (webpage design language)
tutorial, but there are many books to help from beginner to 'Webmaster'.
Check out some of the suggestions below.
Once you have created your pages on your computer, you have to get
them on the Internet. To do this you need something called an FTP
program.
This stands for File Transfer Protocol, but it is just a way of copying
your creation to the ISP's server so everyone can see. Many web design
programs have a 'Wizard' to publish your website, this is simply
an
FTP program hiding behind a user friendly interface.
Just in passing, it is worth mentioning a couple of the more common
design errors. When you link to a page from another page, use a relative
link. This means a link that is not dependant on a disk path. An absolute
link would be something like 'C://temp/myfile.html' whereas a relative
link would be 'myfile.html'. As you can see, the first link would only
work on your computer, not on the webserver. As long as you keep all
the HTML files in the same subdirectory, the second link should work
every time. If you must put files in different subdirectories, the
link
would have to include the URL for the site 'www.mysite/directory/myfile.html'.
This would not work during the design stage unless you are using Microsoft
Frontpage or another program that simulates a webserver. Finally be
careful about using uppercase letters. The files 'Myfile.html' and
'myfile.html'
would be the same on a Windows server or your own computer, but
would be two different files on a UNIX or LINUX server. If you get
the 'file
not found' error, check the case of the file name first.
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