| a potted version of how to set up WEBSITES |
| HTML? FTP? CSS? what? - SEE GLOSSARY AT BOTTOM OF PAGE We have many things to be thankful for, but with virtually nothing in our budget for lots of things including a website, we had to learn how to work on a shoestring. We are artists not web experts, but it was learn the stuff below - or - have no website..... This page is intended to field some frequently asked questions that are put to us and to help you avoid some of the pitfalls in setting up a website. However we can't vouch for it's accuracy, and we can't claim to be experts. We are looking forward to handing maintenance of our websites to someone else. We tried to word it for those that are starting almost from scratch with little knowledge or money, and we've assumed you've at least used a browser to look at websites. It's only a potted version of how to get started and you would be wise to do further research. First, here is a simplified version of how the web works... You may build a website on your computer but in order for others to see it you have to upload it across the internet to another kind of computer called a "server" that houses hundreds or thousands of other website pages. Such server computer memory space that YOU rent from any company set up for this kind of business(known as 'Hosting') may have their server computers connected to phone lines in another part of this country, or in another part of the world - such is the nature of the WorldWideWeb. Here is what can happen in the world of website building... At least 2 quite prominent art organisations we know of have paid "professional web site builders" to build and maintain their website, then when these organisations tried to get control of the website back from the builders in order to update and maintain those sites themselves, were blocked because those builders refuse to divulge passwords necessary to get access to the server space, with arguments about the builder "owning" the design of the site. This is an absurd notion since the design is the very thing you have bought from them. If you have paid for someone to build your site, and taken the risk of also giving them the responsibility of putting it up on the web server for you, and you've seen it online, do not rely on it residing forever in the temporary internet files folder on your own hard drive - make sure that you have complete copies of the pages(go to "Save As" on your browser; in the "Save As" dialogue box choose "Save As type" then choose "Webpage complete(*.htm;*.html)" then go offline and open the pages you have saved to make sure you have everything). OUR OWN SITES:- If you are an organision that cannot for any reason risk your site having to suffer 'downtime',or other such wrangles that are difficult to redress, You may decide to use a local Hosting company. For our own sites we went local(in Quedgeley), and instructed them to invoice us for our chosen domain name registration from NOMINET, and, hosting space. They then provided us with the"host address" "user name" and "password" with which we could(with ftp software we got free off the web - see below) access that hosting space and upload anything we wanted at anytime we liked. Since they are local, any problems and we can knock at their front door. When they registered the domain name they registered it in our name and address, this is very important so check for youself that it is so. If you go online you will discover an endless list of companies that will sell you the service of registering your domain name coupled with renting you server space. Some offer registration of some domain names for as little as £6.40. If you intend to buy the domain name registration cheap then have it hosted elswhere - be a little cautious - We have been told that if you try to take your name and site away from them to place it with another hosting company, it can result in agonising slow cooperation from some companies anxious to keep you paying them for hosting( Who's door are you going to knock on? if you've done everything online, don't assume your hosting company is even in this country [ thanks to Paul Regan for that one]). However for most people there is no reason not to register domains and rent server space from the same company, £30 total seems to be a going rate, but search around. To sum up..... If you get someone outside of your organisation to build the site, then make sure you get a separate third party to do the server webhosting. The server webhosting company should be instructed to 1.buy your chosen domain name and register it to your name and address, 2.rent you server space from them, 3.provide you information to access their server including a/ Host name b/.username c/.password and d/. name of the folder that they expect you to upload your files to. Then get your web page builders to e-mail you the folder containing the site they have built for you ( The typical heirarchy will be:- your home page(usually called index.html) sitting alongside a subfolder containing other pages on your site. Also in this subfolder should be another folder for images.) but dont tell them the host name the user name or the password. You should test your site for flaws on your own computer long before you attempt your first upload. Then upload the pages yourself using FTP software. FTP software programs:- Here's what I did to get ftp software. I went to http://www.yesitsfree.co.uk/stafftp.php , I went to the bottom of the page and clicked "download". On the dialogue box that appeared I clicked "Open" rather than "save" resulting in another dialogue box asking "do you want to run this software?". Click yes and Windows will kick in automatically to offer an installation proceedure). Once installed the staffftp software does not require you to do much more than:- enter the host name, username and password then click connect(big button next to Xbutton), The Left side of the software window allows you to browse your own hard drive in search of the home page file and subfolder you wish to upload. Once connected, The right side shows Hosting company system folders pre-placed on your rented server space by your hosting company, and amongst other folders such as cgibin, will be an empty folder designated for you to open and place your own files and folders. Open that empty folder then go back left to your own Hard Drive, right click your homepage and choose 'upload', right click your subfolder(containing your other pages if you have any, and your images folder if you have any) and choose upload. Therefore your first upload should consist only of you first choosing the index page (home page) and then the subfolder for upload. Later on when you are updating pages, take a tip and do not overwrite pages but rename old pages before you upload the new page. Make a mistake and you may want the old page back. If the list of old stuff grows too large then download because the ftp software works in reverse as well. Only then delete old files from the server. We never delete anything. If you build and/or upload yourself..... and have a slow computer and slow modem...... THE COMPUTER:- At least one member of your organisation/group needs a computer, but it does not need to be a fast one. What is a fast computer? DELL have just sent us an advert for a 3GHz (3GigaHertz speed of the processor) computer with 500Mb ram, 160Gb hard drive, DVDRW plus 17" flat panel screen all for about £350 (!). The 'old' DELL that we were given was half that speed and apparently twice the price, BUT we do not consider the old machine 'slow', or 'old' for that matter. Our machine is fast, it's just that the new machines are faster. We would not turn our nose up at an 800Hz machine(just over 1/4 of the 3Ghz speed) If you've got one do not be in a hurry to replace it, for the Webpage building job we are talking about here, it might do fine. If you are buying one second hand then expect to pay peanuts because remember what £350 can buy. KILOBYTES? MEGABYTES? GIGABYTES? (see bottom of page) If you are a beginner you need to have basic understanding of the difference between a MEGABYTE and a GIGABYTE to stop you paying for a very old 2nd hand machine that's only got half a gigabyte of hard drive memory, when for £100 you could have bought one with a hundred times the size of memory(50 gigabytes). This has happened to a lot of people we know. There is nothing wrong with buying the old machine if you know that its capabilities are all you need, BUT we would expect to pay a lot less than £50 total for the computer+screen. Local newspapers are flooded with this old stuff. It's a buyers market for both old and new computers. THE COMPUTER DRIVES Floppy, CD, DVD:- When I was a technician, one of the companies I was contracted to, tested motherboard components in ovens at high temperatures. The idea was that if a component was going to fail it would do so in the first few hours. Otherwise it was hardly likely to fail at all. The same cannot be said of the Drives because they contain moving parts. Moving parts mean friction. Friction means parts will wear out. Bear this in mind if you are buying an old machine. I would consider it a fair risk, shrug my shoulders and replace a broken drive probably from another old machine. It's not the years, it's the mileage. You'll notice I didn't mention the hard drive. If the Hard drive goes, that's bad, but their engineering is more substantial, not as flimsy as the other drives. But I don't know about the hard drive so I'm guessing. Could someone out there please let us know. THE SCREEN(monitor):- Screens start to wear out almost straight away. Well used ones will have lost much of their 'white point' and turned dull and grey. Even when recallibrated and with the brightness and contrast set to best effect, some old monitors I've seen are virtually unreadable. If you are working a lot with images it is wise to recallibrate your monitor from time to time, (even if it's recent it's going to need regular recallibration) otherwise you can't tell what an image that you've put up on the web really looks like to someone with a new monitor. I don't know about the new flat screens, can someone please let us know. To recalibrate Go to control panel. choose Adobe Gamma. INTERNET ACCESS;- You need a land line phone with modem for internet access but fast speed like broadband is not necessary providing the webpages consist mainly of text with only a few small images, but if you cannot avoid large quantities of images, then be prepared for longer ftp upload times. Download times are less of a concern for you if you assume most people viewing(downloading) your site have faster machines and faster internet access. In other words if you are building a site that needs a fast download time for your viewers, their desire for speed has nothing to do with, and is not affected by your building on a slow machine and uploading slowly to a server. We built our site to accomodate viewers with 1./almost the smallest screens (800x600 pixels) 2./slow computers and 3./slow dial up modems and no broadband. If you assume everyone has fast machines and internet access you are going to lose a big proportion of potential viewers that will lose patience waiting for your bloated site to download. WEBPAGE BUILDING software programs:- You may need website page building software, but software like "HOMEPAGE" is usualy free with Microsoft Windows and allready installed on most recent computers. I don't know if older versions have it. Please let me know. At a complete loss? try searching online for free software. If you are only responsible for a single website then buying an expensive webpage building software program like DREAMWEAVER makes no sense at all. Good website page building software works like a word processor, in fact - use "Microsoft Word" the same program you use to write letters(with option of adding images - see IMAGES below), and some versions may give you the option of saving your "letter" as a web page. Want to try it ? First, find the file of a letter to experiment with, highlight it and press Ctrl+c to copy it to your clipboard. To make sure you create the same Hierarchy used on your server space - Create a new folder on your Desktop, enter it and Ctrl+v to paste the letter, create a new folder next to the webpage and name it images, place copies of the images you want to use in that images folder. In WORD, open the copy of the letter you just saved, then use the 'insert function' to locate and paste your images. Go to "Save As"; choose "Save As type" then choose "Web Page(*.htm;*.html)" ). After exiting WORD, locate the file and double click it to see what it looks like as a web page in a browser. The page would already function as a web page. The addition of meta tags will give it a tiny bit more chance of being found in a search. To add Meta Tags go to your browser tool bar and go to View and click View Source. You will now see HTMLcode for your letter in a notepad. A few lines down from the top you will see the word <head> copy and paste the code below(known as Meta Tags) underneath or alongside the word <head> but then replace the text NOTHING with your own description of your page, and replace the word ZERO with your own keywords(words you think a person might type into a search engine to find a document like yours) put a comma after each keyword.
Some people use no website building program at all but instead hard code html into a notepad. To learn more on meta tags and HTML, Useful resources are:- HTML for the world wide web with xhtml and css by Elizabeth Castro, - and HTML in 10 simple steps or less by Robert G. Fuller & Laurie Ann Ulrich. and of course the internet itself Try seeing if these or similar books are available from your local library. They contain not just code but stuff about how the web works. Even if you yourself are not building, a little knowledge may save you money somewhere along the line. Only a little knowledge of HTML is necessary to build webpages. A little additional knowledge of CSS applied locally to a page can help, but no knowledge of it at all will not stop you building pages. The aesthetics of the web page are less important at this stage, than functionality. For example, If you are building an art page then your purpose should be to display the art, not a frilly page. The tendency of many professional builders is to show off their skills sometimes to the detriment of the speed, functionality and purpose of the webpage, and a whole industry has grown around feeding a tendency to over engineer simply because it can be done. This page only consists of text and the necessary links plus the hidden meta name code described above. Why bother adding anything else? IMAGES:- You've decided to add images because words are not enough. Know that text uploads/downloads fast but images generally use far more space (with no images this rather long text only page is a mere 30kb ). JPEG images compress when saving,(image dimensions won't change, but the memory space it takes up will get smaller) Therefore Crop your images to the smallest you think you can get away with. To do that you'll need an image manipulation program but first check your computer because one may allready be installed - if not there are plenty of companies on the web eager to give you free 30 day trial demos , or even partially functioning programs with no time limit. Since all you need is to crop the image, and compress the memory file size of the image you won't be interested in buying their fully functioning all singing/dancing versions anyway. The resolution of most computer screens is 72dpi (dots per inch). Therefore if you want a jpeg image to fill 1/4 of an 800dpi x 600dpi monitor screen, then a 14cm x 10.5cm image with a resolution of 72dpi will result in a memory disc file size of about 32kb (you could fit about 30 onto an old floppy disk) AND, - if you get a free program from the internet called PhotoResizer 1.06 in order to compress still further, then your image will download at about the same speed as the bare text of this page. SUBMIT your URL:- If you want your site to be ranked by the search engines then you may want to submit your url to them. Our url might be www.gloucesterarttrail.co.uk/ or www.sabreart.co.uk/ sometimes they want the full thing as seen in the address bar like this http://www.sabreart.co.uk/ Simply type add url or add url msn or add url google into the search bar of MSN YAHOO or GOOGLE Here is a complete quote from an MSN search result to show you what you are looking for.... "Generally our web crawler, MSNBot, can find most pages on the Internet. However if your site does not appear on Live Search, you can send us the address (URL). search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 " In other words, they are claiming that if your page is all present and correct on your rented server space, that they will find it anyway. We would still submit it anyway. GLOSSARY:- HTML(Hyper text Markup Language) The code used to construct this page(go top of your browser,click"page",click"view source") CSS(Cascading Style Sheets)invented after HTML primarily to enable a single page to affect changes to scores of other pages without having to modify every single page. Powerful though not essential. If you're only building a few simple pages then it's "too big a bazooka for the job" but it can be used in tiny 'local' bits alongside HTML. NOMINET(we are told it's the supposed official British register of .co.uk domains) they only do .co.uk , but not .com or .org or dot anything else. Check them out online if you want to know more. HOMEPAGE(Webpage building software that often comes bundled with Microsoft Windows ) DREAMWEAVER(Expensive Webpage building software), don't bother with this if you are just building a few pages. FTP(file transfer protocol) different to the http you see top left address bar, http is downloading the page for you to see, ftp is downloading or uploading the blind file of the page and thats all. JPEG or jpg, short for jpeg, short for joint photographic experts group. Reduces file size by compression of the files information. KILOBYTES MEGABYTES GIGABYTES To repeat once again - If you are a beginner you need to have basic understanding of the difference between a MEGABYTE and a GIGABYTE to stop you paying for a very old machine thats only got half a gigabyte of hard drive memory, when for £100 you could have bought one hundred times the size of memory(50 gigabytes). There is nothing wrong with buying the old machine if you know thas its capabilities are all you need, BUT we would expect to pay a lot less than £50 for the computer and screen. Local newspapers are flooded with this old stuff. It's a buyers market for both old and new computers. 8 bits in a byte 1000 bytes in a kilobyte 1000 kilobytes in a megabyte 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte 1000 gigabytes in a terrabyte If you've spotted any mistakes - thought of better ways to explain basics - or thought of something we've missed out that you think should be mentioned, then email us at mail@sabreart.co.uk and we'll add your contribution as long as its not binary. | ||||||