If
you decide this afternoon to make a web site, the hardest task will
be choosing how to go about it. Will you be creating a complex web
site with e-commerce capabilities or an online notepad with names
of your favorite CDs and a picture of your cat? Will this web site
be your Opus, worthy of weeks of your free time, or do you want
the thing up and running in 10 minutes? Your chosen end result will
determine how you should proceed.
If you are an AOL member or major Internet Service Provider member
like Earthlink, you have Free Web Space available to you. That means
that, armed with very little knowledge of web design, you really
could be waving "Hello World" in cyberspace within the
next half hour. On the other hand, if you want to sell or display
goods, or personal artistic creations, much planning is necessary.
You'll have many tasks ahead before visitors are pointing and clicking
through your Web site. What, then, should you do?
First, consider how unique you would like the name to be. If you
chose a "basic site" option, for example, through Geocities
or AOL, your site URL will not be very descriptive. In other words,
if you were hoping for something more elegant than http://members.aol.com/reallygreatsite/myfolder/index.htm,
consider obtaining web hosting, and secure a domain name (www.reallygreatsite.com,
for example).
Next, you must consider what software to use for creating your
site. You can create a Microsoft Word or Publisher document and,
rather painlessly, convert it to a Web site. You can use a basic
Web Page design program such as Adobe Page Mill. For more powerful
sites, consider Macromedia Dreamweaver or Sausage Software's HotDog
Pro 6.
If all these choices sound overwhelming, you'll be amazed at how
much help is available online, once you've acquired a bit of knowledge.
In order to create a professional-looking site, working with a software
package is mandatory, but there is also tons of free help available
online. Here are some examples:
For web resources such as backgrounds, fonts, clickable interfaces
and templates, stop by http://www.graphicsbydezign.com/.
For free graphics and buttons of all types, check out http://www.syruss.com/.
For advice on multimedia, advanced authoring tools and e-commerce,
visit www.webmonkey.com.
These days, almost all sites are Java-powered in one way or another.
For excellent Java resources, pay a visit to http://www.javacoffeebreak.com/index.html
or http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/java/.
To learn more about the basic language of Web page design, HTML,
pay a visit to http://www.cc.ukans.edu/%7Eacs/docs/other/HTML_quick.shtml
or http://dolphin.upenn.edu/%7Ewebinfo/html.html.
And after your site is basically finished, there are tons of embellishments
that make your site more practical, efficient, or just plain fun
to visit. For free guest books, stop in at http://www.freeguestbooks.com/,
add a form to your site by visiting www.freeandclear.nu,
and obtain tools for keeping track of the number of visitors at
www.sitetracker.com or
http://www.homepagenow.com/counters.html.
Oh, and when your site is complete and online for the world to see,
run it by the folks at http://websitegarage.netscape.com/.
They'll make concrete suggestions for improving it.
In exploring the sites mentioned above, you'll discover how prudent
it is to limit your experimenting and say to yourself, "No,
I do not need that feature." Nonetheless, it's quite rewarding
to see how freely members of the Web community share their creativity
and resources with others.
Winston Steward
Instructor, Dreamweaver 3
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Creating a Web Site by Winston Steward