Building Your Own Website

Part II


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Robin Nobles

Robin Nobles

Robin writes newspaper columns that offer tours of the Internet. Her newspaper columns are published in several newspapers and magazines across the South. She also teaches online courses in search engine marketing strategies at the Academy of Web Specialists.

She has co-written the books "Maximize Web Site Traffic, Build Web Site Traffic Fast and Free by Optimizing Search Engine Placement" and "Web Site Analysis and Reporting".

She can be reached at [email protected] or through her website: Robin's Nest for Writers - http://www.robinsnest.com/

Robin Nobles has written 2 articles for WebKnowHow.

View all articles by Robin Nobles...

Okay, you have an HTML editor, you have plotted out your website, and you've taken time to read a few tutorials on what to do. Simply fire up that fancy editor, pick an appropriate template (which is simply a skeleton of a page where you can enter in your own data), and play. HTML editors have a very handy feature that allows you to preview the page as you're working, so I recommend clicking on that preview button often! This will show you how the page would look on the Web.

Once you've gotten your feet wet with HTML, you can begin to add other things to your practice web pages, like graphics, buttons, backgrounds, etc. Keep in mind that overloading your site with those wonderfully cute graphics only makes the page load that much slower. Visit How to Lose Your Web Viewers and learn that for every 10 seconds it takes for your graphics to load before your page contents can be seen, you risk losing 20 percent of your remaining viewers.

An excellent spot to look for graphics is The Clip Art Connection, where the graphics are divided into categories and themes, which makes it much easier to find what you want.

When building your site, save the main page (home page) as "index.html." From there, name your other pages based on their content. Be sure to provide a link from your main page to each of the other pages.

You have your beginning site, so now you need to actually put your masterpiece on the Web for the world to see. Many service providers offer free website space as part of their monthly service. Check with your Internet service provider to see if they provide free space and exactly what you need to do to upload your site. If your service provider doesn't offer free space, check with Geocities. Geocities even provides a File Manager Utility program for creating a website.
http://www.geocities.com/

After you learn the procedures for uploading your site to the Web, you'll need a good FTP program to upload the pages. Back at Stroud's, search for CuteFTP, which is one of the best File Transfer Protocol clients available on the market.

Hopefully, this will get you off and running with your own website. Of course, when building a site, there are many other considerations that you will want to address later, such as the importance of META tags, how to add CGI scripts for guestbooks/counters, how to use frames and tables, and much more. But all of that comes with experience (and, in my case, the help of a few very good friends!).

We'll close with an article titled, How to Publicize a Website by Richard Seltzer, which outlines ways to promote your site.