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The Web Site
Designing a web site can be a little hit or miss in the beginning, whether your site is for a group or businesses. If you need help getting off the ground we’re more than happy to help you in offering advice for the design phase, however, there are a few golden ”Do nots“ to think about;
- If this is your first web site, don't try to make it all singing and dancing straight away, web sites can be very time consuming and people’s expectation can be insatiable. If you have volunteers all well and good, but ask yourself if those volunteers will still be about in 6 months time? We’ve seen people buckle under the weight of an all consuming time hungry web site when volunteers dropped away. Nearly all these web sites are no longer live!
Building a web site gradually allows you to judge your commitments and means that the returning viewer can see the web site as dynamic and growing.
- Temptation exists to add music and moving pictures to the web site, please resist, music invariably takes time to load on the viewers computer and what sounds great to your sound system doesn’t always sound good on a PC Speaker!
- Moving pictures, called ‘animated gifs’ or ‘flash animation’ can be fun, but rule of thumb is never to put more than two on a page, they can slow down the page loading and, more importantly, distract the person from the message on the page.
- Backgrounds: You might want a tartan background but if you can't read the text on it (and there are so many of them!) there is little point in putting up the text. Off white is good or white, all depends on how much needs to be read!
When thinking of your web site simply keep saying to yourself, "who is this web site for" keep the answer in mind when you are thinking about what pages you need. The basic web site will have the following pages;
- A "Home Page", that’s normally the first page you arrive at, this is for quick news and links to the web site. Because this is the page that people normally see first you want to keep it short and simple. As an example, "Alison has her baby! Find out about the new boy by clicking here", rather than getting all the information on this page. Keep your home page as short as you can and keep it updated!
- A "News Page", depending on your group or company this page can be full of up to date info, also keeps the main information from the home page
- A "Contact Page", details of how people can contact you, you would be amazed how many people forget this!
- Keep your photos small in terms of weight, i.e. a normal photo from a 3 megapixel camera phone is about 400 bytes, use a program to reduce this to 50 or 60 bytes
Always review your web site!
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Web Building
You’ll hear people talk about Macromedia, FrontPage and Cold Fusion amongst many web authoring packages, indeed the government, central and local, have been promoting them as training packages to help people get local people to design web sites to increase local content (what ever that is). The idea was sound, however, these packages ”upgrade“ all the time and take a bit to learn, so if you are looking to be a web designer go for it! However, we must assume that, until the bug bites, you’ll want to just get one site up and running, in which case there are many packages out there, some hosting packages come with an ”easy web site creator“, all are valid.
We hear a lot about the pro and cons of each package, however, when you visit a web site do you know, or even ask, what package designed the site you’re looking at? No!
On our computers we have Microsoft’s FrontPage, Adobes Macromedia and a simple HTML editor called Page Breeze, however we use EZ Generator, a simple, powerful but above all easy to use web builder! We’ll recommend this to you and we offer a basic support service to groups, even though the support on this product from Image Line is free to registered users and outstanding!
FrontPage and Macromedia are hundreds of pounds, Page Breeze is free to download and EZ Generator is about £60 to £70 depending on the exchange rate! Unlike the others pay fors, upgrades are free with EZ Generator!
 Go here and download it, they have a test one to let you try it: www.ezgenerator.com and yes, this site is produce using EZ Generator. Anyone used to FrontPage and MacroMedia will find this package fantastic to work with!
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There are various free resources on the web which can enhance your web site. I'll write a whole bit on copyright, but remember that copyright is implied, it doesn't need a "©" figure to be protected.
Images
 Animated gifs: I don't recommend using to many of them on a page but they have a place if used intelligently, DO NOT get carried away!
www.gifs.net
 Need to edit a gif (even animated) or resize it or give it a clear background or change it's colours... you get the picture (that was a joke)? The there is a fantastic online resource for you... GIF Works, we love it:
www.gifworks.com/image_editor.html
You have to be careful about using some images online, especially if you are using it for profit! I find it's best to go and get or create your own!
Here's a good place to go, takes a little hunting around though. If you like a photo on say www.photo.net (my favourite photo site), email the owner and ask permission, you would be amazed in the generosity of people. For free photos go here:
www.webshots.com
Search Engines
An essential aspect of a web site is to ensure that you are available in the search engines, this is how most people discover your site. Most viewers will most probably see your domain name advertised on your posters and letters, unless you are a business don't worry about "ranking" to much! To see if you are "spidered" on Google (that means to see if your web site is on Google) use:
Google Site Status
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Hosting
After you get a domain name you’ll need to find somewhere to ”host“ it. Hosting offers you the opportunity to place your web site on a computer specially designed for the internet, called a ”server“.
There are a variety of the hosting companies, and we’ve tried quite a few, the best one we found is Lunar Pages, if you do decide to host yourself please use this link, we'll get some commission! (doesn't effect what you get charged but helps us a lot!):
Alternatively, we host you here for £50 per year (a little more for .com's, .org's) and this includes the domain name too! That way we'll take care of all the setting up and administration and any headaches!
www.110mb.com: Is a free hosting service, and as far as we can see it’s a good one, offering more than some ”pay for“ models.
The down side is that you need to buy the extras to make some of the features on our web sites work, i.e. PHP and SQL, however the upside is that if you have a straight forward HTML web site it’s pretty good.
Once you load your site up simply ”web forward“ your domain to your 110mb.com address, ours is http://inrenfrewshire.110mb.com, we test web site here before they go live, however, click on www.websatwork.co.uk for an example of "web forwarding" and see where you arrive!
To check out 110mb.com click on this link:
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Other Packages & Services |
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Other packages and services we use and recommend to you:
Software
PageBreeze HTML editor, it’s a bit of fun and allows you to easily edit HTML code if you ever want or need too: www.pagebreeze.com
To stop the ”spambots“ that’s programs that search the internet for email addresses to send spam too, we use ”Mailto Obfuscator“ – simply type in your email address and copy the code into your web page, it’s not fool proof but a good guard: obfuscator
Photo Resizing tool is essential if your adding photos to the web site, ideally you need to reduce the ”weight“ of the photograph, that’s the number of bytes in the photo. Normally a digital camera takes photos that are about 1.3Mb in size but on a web site they need to lose weight, to about 40 – 100k depending on other factors. We recommend the following photo resizing tool: bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm - remember that EZ Generator will do this for you too!
Even though EZ Generator has it’s own FTP (file transfer protocol), that’s the way you publish (put the files on your computer on a web server) your web site to the internet, it’s often good to have your own, WS FTP and Cute FTP are industry standards, however, for a free one that does everything you need try Coffee Cup FTP: www.coffeecup.com/direct-ftp
Domain name
A domain name, ours is www.3dc.org.uk, you can register these at various places, however we found that www.123-reg.co.uk was by far the cheapest and the best.
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Viruses & Nasties
We each wage a war against unseen forces on the Internet each and every day without knowning it, sometimes we have casualties most of the time we are oblivious to it. We should each defend against these. Here are the best free packages available to you. I always suggest making the choice to upgrade but these free packages are excellent!
Anti Virus Packages
Free anti virus can be got from one of the best in the business: AVG Anti Virus - http://free.grisoft.com
As a matter of good practise he should apply a ”check for viruses“ every day, you can set these to do this in the background and be safe!
Spyware Packages
Also referred to as Scumware, and it is a pain in the backside, remember that your browsing and web activity is private so don't give away control to someone else
Install either:
Ad Aware: Click Here
or
Spbot S&D (Search & Destroy), my favourite,: Click Here
They will remove, advise and update (but always check for updates!).
They are free and they are both really good.
Win the battle!
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