How To Build Your Website

The Internet is a great leveller. Be it a poet or a painter, everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame here. But the dotcom boom is over, and only the truly creative or moneymaking websites are around now. The time is right for you to let the creative juices flow and get noticed. It's time you got a web identity and made it the most happening place to be on the World Wide Web-and without going on a spending binge!

Step 1
Get your domain name

First things first-decide on a name for your site. A domain name is the name by which your site is known to the world. It could be something like yourname.com or, if you like, yourname.freeservice.com. A '.com' domain name usually signifies that you are a commercial entity. If you are designing a website for an organisation, you could go in for a '.org', and in case you are making websites related to the Net, a '.net' domain would be the best bet. A Universal Resource Locater (URL) is the address of any page on your website. If you get your domain name registered, then your URL and domain name will be the same.

You can get yourself a yourname.com by registering it with a Domain Registrar. Earlier, you could only register domain names at www.network solutions.com at exorbitant rates. But now there are many domain name registrars to choose from, so find one which offers the best services at the least price. Check out bulkregister.com, opensrs.net or register.com-but only if you can pay with an international credit card. Or, if you prefer to pay in cash and want a domain registrar somewhere near you, check out places like Net4domains (www.net4domains.com) or Polar Software (www.signdomains.com). Here, you can get domain names registered for as low as Rs 400 per annum. All you have to do is fill up an online form and they will take care of the rest!

If you're not willing to invest money in a domain name, or someone else has already taken the domain you wanted, you could consider other options, like going in for a redirection service like http://come.to/. Once registered here, you can input your long URL like http://www.freeservice.com/~yourname/yourstartpage.html and get a shorter URL for the same like http://come.to/yourname. Such names make it easier for people to remember your web address. www.cjb.net and http://bounce.to/v3home.asp are some of the good redirection services. Alternatively, you could go with the name of your site as provided by your Web space provider. For example, Tripod provides names like http://members.tripod.com/~username/index.html and Webjump provides addresses like http://yourname.webjump.com.

Step 2
Get server space

If you have your own domain, you might as well lease yourself some server space on a Web server, which you will need to store the files of your website. Leasing space on a server means you won't have irritating pop-up advertisements on your website. There are many companies which rent out server space these days, so look around for a good deal. Check with your local cyber café owner-he might have a great package in store for you. Also, these days, server space and domain names are bundled together at special rates, so search the classifieds to see where to get one of those. Or, go to Net4India, SignDomains or DirectI (www.directi.com) and check out their offers. Net4India even has a special sub-1500 (rupee) package for students, which might be a good bet.

The other way is to sign up for some free web space. You can get enough space for a whole professional website for free, but the catch is that these sites will display banner advertisements on your website whenever anyone tries to view it, which might take away some of the look from your beautiful site. (See box to figure which free server will be the best bet for your needs.)

There are basically two choices for the operating systems running on the server-Windows NT and Linux. Windows NT is usually for high-end websites and is expensive as compared to a Linux server. Most of the time, Linux server space comes cheap, sometimes as low as Rs 50 per megabyte per annum. Linux servers are faster, more secure and can do almost anything a Windows server can do.

Step 3
Get the content

A happening domain name is no guarantee of a crowd-pulling site. The content is what will bring people to your site. So, you must update your website very regularly so that people keep coming back. Like, if you are an aviation hobbyist, you could collect the latest information and links from the Internet and other sources of information and share it with fellow aviators and so on.

With such a big resource at hand (the Internet!), content should never be a problem. What matters is the frequency of updates. Here, you could again use the free services of some websites to help people keep in touch with the latest on your site. Some free space providers like Bizland even provide these! Otherwise, sign up for syndicated content from sites like iSyndicate Express (isyndicate.com), 7AM News (7am.com) and Everyone.net. You get the HTML code of their Java applets that you can put up on your site and provide general as well as topically focused content updates.

Step 4
Design your pages

Keep it simple, stupid!' is the recommended strategy here. Often people design websites that are full of loud colour combinations and huge images-and have load timings that seem like infinity. So, before starting the actual designing, take a crash course in web design. Two good places to start would be Web Monkey (www.hotwired.com/webmonkey) and About.com's design section (http://webdesign.about.com).

After this explorative trip, you will have an idea of what you want in terms of the look and feel of your site. It is always better to put these designs to paper first, and satisfy yourself that they look good. Now it is time for the actual designing to begin.

You don't need to learn HTML any more to design your pages. There are loads of editors around these days, like Microsoft FrontPage (which comes as a part of MS Office) and Macromedia Dreamweaver-that's from www.macromedia.com-that you can use to design your website. They take care of the messy HTML code at the backend. But if you know HTML, it is an advantage as you can edit the HTML code generated by these programs and remove all the redundant tags to optimize speed.

Most free website providers also provide you with free site builders. These are wizards which give you standard templates and let you mix and match combinations out of them. But it is always better to make your own pages, as you really can't go a long way with these templates.

FREEBIES FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Isyndicate.com: Free News, headlines and content from over 150 partners in the Isyndicate Express program. Humanclick.com: Free chat and community Services. Everyone.net: Plug-in Email, Community, Ad Sales and Search for yourname.com. Google.com: Free Search for your website and the Internet. Hostedscripts.com: Free CGI scripts hosted on a third party server. You just need to register and take the "cut and paste" code from them. Javascripts.com and Scriptsearch.com: Free Javascripts, Perl and PHP Scripts for your usage. Guestbooks.net: Free guest books for your site.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so you would want to put graphics on your website, right? In case you have your own pictures, you can edit them using tools like Paint Shop Pro (www.jasc.com) and Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com). Paint Shop Pro is an easy-to-use shareware program which you can learn to use on the job. And if you want to make things come alive by putting some animation up on your site, try out Macromedia's Flash, which is lightweight and industry standard. To learn how to use Flash, check out the tutorials at Web Monkey and FlashZone (www.flashzone.com).

If you don't have images of your own, you might want to use some from another website. Usually you can do this if you acknowledge the website from where you have taken the images, as that takes care of the copyrights. Also, there are thousands of free images, clip arts and icons on the web, which you can download from sites like www.animfactory.com and www.free-graphics.com.

All said and done, everything on the Internet is relative. So, if you are looking out for some killer websites, make sure you visit www.killersites.com. Here, you can get some innovative ideas which you can use while designing your own site. And for the other side of the coin, you should take a look at www.webpagesthatsuck.com, for some fine examples of the most horrible web designs!

Step 5
The bells and whistles

Go the extra mile to provide your visitors services that will make them come back to your site. You can get these services from sites like Everyone.net, which gives you the facility to create your own communities, and also offer free e-mail like user@yourname.com, customised search and even Ad Sales programs.

And if readymade free stuff doesn't appeal to you, you could always do some of your own! There are loads of sites that provide free Java applets, Javascripts, Perl and PHP scripts to add features to your site or just have some fun. You can download them from various websites and tinker with them to suit your needs. Check out www.hotscripts.com and www.scriptsearch.com.

Step 6
Launch yourself

You might not need as many teasers as Digen Verma did to tell people who you are. After your site is up and ready, transfer the files from your computer to the Web server. For this, you will need to use an FTP program like CuteFTP. Just key in your server name, login name and your password to get started. The rest is simple, similar to copying files on your local hard drive.

The best way to advertise your site is by word of mouth. Start using email@yourname.com to send your e-mail. Also, add a signature to all your e-mail inviting people to visit your site. After all, that is how Hotmail reached where it's at!

Also, you must submit your site to search engines like Yahoo! and Lycos. You can do this by going to each of these search engines and manually submitting your pages there. Or, use services like Submit-it! (www.submitit.com) that submit your site to the all the top search engines on the Net.

Step 7
Try making money!

While you're at it, why not try to make some money out of your website, too? You could put up banner advertisements on your website and earn huge amounts of crisp notes through it. These third party banner programs like linkexchange.com and everyone.net share their booty with you and send you money depending on the number of ad views and clicks they get on your site.

If your website focuses on some specific topic or field of interest and seems like the last word on it, you could consider joining an affiliate program of a major like amazon.com, where people could buy books and stuff related to your topic of interest from Amazon through your website, and you would get a small commission on the transaction.

As I said at the beginning, you can be yourself and express your freedom and creativity on the Internet. So go ahead and explore the avenues-it's over to you now!

courtesy:india-today.com

 

 

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