You don’t have to be a professional to create a good home page, explains Jack Schofield
Anybody can create a website. No special software is needed – you can create pages with a simple text editor, such as Windows’s Notepad or the Mac’s Simpletext – and there’s no shortage of Web space. Most Internet service providers (ISPs) bundle free Web space with their dial-up accounts.
There are also dozens of sites offering free space to all comers. The trade-off is that the free space provider will sell an advertising banner on your site – though, like Yahoo! last week, they may also claim rights over content that you might not like.
Some ISPs and most suppliers of free Web space provide templates that enable users to create pages without learning any HTML (hypertext mark-up language). This is the quickest and easiest approach and has just been adopted in the new home page services offered in the United States by AOL and Microsoft .
Unfortunately it’s also the worst. If you use a template, your site will look much like all the other sites that use the same template. Also, you’ll have to construct and update the site online, which will add to your phone bill.
And if you’re not willing to put any effort into site design, why should visitors pay any attention to your content? Using a template does avoid the problem of learning how to upload text and image files to the Web server, usually done with a file transfer protocol (FTP) program. But if you want to use your own photographs and artwork, and aren’t using Front Page 2000, you’ll probably have to learn how to do that eventually.
It’s also possible to create a Web site offline, on your own computer, without learning any HTML. The simplest way is to use a word processor with a “Save as HTML” option, such as Microsoft Word. Skilled Web designers may well recommend that you avoid using HTML generated by all office programs, but trawl round the Web and you’ll find thousands of perfectly adequate Web pages created with Word, and the latest Word 2000 makes a decent stab at doing the job.
Even so, it’s worth the extra effort needed to use the Web equivalent of a desktop publishing program to generate your pages. Robert Neuschul, technical director of Internet design consultancy Imagineering Technologies, recommends Macromedia’s Dream weaver and Adobe’s Go-Live, both of which are available for personal computers and Macs. Front Page 2000 – included in Microsoft Office Professional – is also a good choice.
Neuschul says it’s a definite improvement over previous versions. “I wouldn’t use it myself,” he says, “but for a beginner or for someone wanting to do a small commercial site, it’s a very good starting point, especially if the company is using the rest of the Office 2000 suite.”
One drawback with Front Page is that some of the facilities require programs to be run on the server. These “Front Page extensions” are provided with Microsoft’s Windows NT server, and are available free for Linux, but not every Web space provider supports them.
Another drawback with all three programs is that they cost money. If you’re a beginner, you may prefer to start with the free program Arachnophilia or cheap shareware (try before you buy) software such as Coffee Cup’s HTML Express. And if you want to write your own HTML, you can make life easier by using a proper HTML editor such as Site-Aid, which is free and looks very similar to Front Page.
The other essential bit of software is an FTP program, since the FTP that Microsoft provides with Windows runs under DOS. The most popular offerings include Globalscape’s Cute FTP, and Ipswitch’s WS FTP. There’s also the Terrapin FTP for Windows 95/98/ NT and Monica for the Mac.
It doesn’t really matter which you use as long as you can make it work. All the programs you need to create a website can be downloaded from the Net. If you plan to download lots of things, start with Headlight Software’s Getright, which will redial and restart downloads even if you get cut off. But it’s probably quicker and easier to start with a cover CD from Future’s Net magazine, which carries software for Windows 95/98 and Windows 3.1.
When it comes to designing Web pages, the golden rule is Kiss, or keep it simple, stupid. Neuschul’s advice is:
l Do the thinking before the coding: use paper and pencil to “storyboard” your site.
l Don’t make any page bigger than it needs to be, and don’t be afraid to make more pages and link them to your main page.
l Don’t put anything on a page unless it is essential. Avoid large images that take ages to download.
Amateur sites often consist of one huge Web page with a scattering of pointless images and animations on a confusing background. Visitors are far more likely to leave for a better site than scroll to the bottom. Good professional sites, by contrast, tend to have plain backgrounds and lots of links to content organised in sub-pages. One way to learn about Web design is to use the browser’s “view source” command to see how other people have done it.
Stealing someone else’s site is illegal, immoral and will make you come out in spots, but it’s quite common for people to nick bits of code and adapt them. Paul Ockenden, technical director of internet specialist CST Group, says: “Think about copyright. You can’t just go stealing words and pictures from other people’s sites.
By all means use “view source” to see how they’ve achieved certain effects, but make sure your site is all your own work. There are hundreds of suppliers that offer free code and images. If you want a counter, a tracking system, a guest book, a bulletin board or some other feature, you can probably get it just by pasting their code into your page.
Useful examples include eXTReMe digital’s Extreme Tracking, FreeFind’s search engine and Beseen’s message board and chat-room software. Usually the quid pro quo for free features is that your site must carry a button or banner that advertises and links back to the supplier.
When you’ve finished building your website, you’ll be able to go through the pages on your computer as though they were online. Don’t be deceived by the speed: a modem connection isn’t as fast as your hard drive. Try to get each page down to 35 kilobytes or less so visitors won’t have to wait. Check that your pages display correctly in a reasonable range of Web browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera.
It may be asking a lot of beginners to check their pages when so many “professionals” plainly can’t be bothered. But there is a simple way to catch a lot of problems. When you’ve uploaded your pages, send the address to the Web Site Garage or NetMechanic, which will check the site for you.
The World Wide Web Consortium also offers an HTML validator. Once you’ve put your website online, you will probably want other people to look at it. If it’s a family site, all you have to do is e-mail the address to people who might be interested. If your site might be of interest to a wider audience, you may want to publicise it. Try to get links to your site posted on sites that deal with the same topic.
Good sites generally don’t want to link to bad ones, but they will swap links if your pages are interesting. You can also e-mail the address to people who create sites of nothing but links, and join a Web Ring at , where anything from half- a-dozen to several hundred sites are linked together. Then wait three months. If your site is entertaining, unique or not widely available, then it may get lots of visitors. Perhaps it deserves a wider audience. If so, tear it apart and start again.
By this time you should have learned enough to do a better job, and you can eliminate fundamental design mistakes only by starting from scratch. There are many more things to consider when designing a second site. These include the use of “meta tags” (which let you describe your site), alt tags (which tell people what an image is before it is downloaded), advertising banners, affiliate programs, search engine rankings and more. But content is the most important of all.
Finally, if you want a site to be taken seriously, it’s now almost essential to pay for your own domain name. At the very least, use a redirection service such as Findhere.com. This also has the advantage that you’ll be able to move your site from one free space provider to another without changing the address.