Esay Guide On Creating Your Own Website

Step 1 First you need to create a text document containing the words that you want to appear on your Web page. Most word processing programs will work fine, as long as you give your document a name ending in .html (or .htm if you're working on a PC) and save the document as "Text Only." Type out your story, book review, fascinating facts about Jupiter, or whatever it is you want to publish. Here are some tips for organizing your text:

Begin with a title and an attention-grabbing greeting or introduction, so people will know immediately what your page is about and will want to read more.

Think about logical places to insert breaks in your text. No one wants to scroll down a long, uninterrupted block of text. Your page will be a lot more readable if you put in frequent paragraph breaks and horizontal rules (more about these later).

Think about where you might want to insert pictures, if you have them in electronic files. (More about downloading images in Step #4.) A lot of pages start off with an eye-catching image right at the top, next to the title.

If your word processing program has an option for "smart" or "curly" quotes, turn it off! Curly quotes will show up on a browser as strange little icons rather than quotation marks. The straight quotes may not look as nice, but they're the ones you have to use for Web authoring.

Step 2 Now you need to insert some formatting tags in your document that will tell an Internet browser (such as Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer) how to arrange your words and pictures on the screen. These tags make up a language called HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. The basic skeleton for an HTML document looks like this:

Text of page...

Notice that (1) each formatting tag appears between "less than" (<) and "greater than" (>) signs, and (2) the tags often appear in pairs, with the second tag in the pair beginning with a "slash" (/).
Here's a list of some of the basic formatting tags in HTML:

...

header, level 1 (the largest size type for a header, usually used at the beginning of a page or the start of a new section). Smaller headers are tagged with

...

,

...

, etc.
...
boldface text
...
italic text

...
centered text

paragraph return (inserts an extra line space between paragraphs)
Note: Any paragraph returns that you insert in your document by simply hitting the Return key on your keyboard will be ignored by a Web browser. You must use the tag

to create a paragraph break on the screen.


line break (no extra space)

---

horizontal rule (a line running left-to-right across the page, to separate one section from the next)

...

ordered, or numbered, list. Each list item begins with the tag

and falls somewhere between the

...

tags.

...

unordered, or bulleted, list. Again, each list item begins with the tag

.
...
a hotlink to another file in the same folder
...
a hotlink to another site. You will have to know the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or Web address, of any site to which you want to link your page.

This tag would insert an image with the filename "image.gif" on the far left side of your page.
(Note: Don't worry if this information seems confusing or overwhelming right now. It will make more sense as you apply it in the next few steps.)

Step 3 You may feel somewhat baffled after reading that long list of formatting tags in Step #2. It's easier just to look at a real HTML document and then see how it gets translated into a Web page. You can view the "source document" behind any Web page by going to the "View" menu (in Safari -- other browsers may be slightly different) and selecting "View Source." When you do this, you'll see the document with HTML tags that creates the page currently in the window of your browser.

We've created a Sample Web Page for you to study. Using the link below, go to the Sample Web Page and look at how the text and image appear on your screen. Then use "View Source" to call up the document we used to create the sample page. If possible, print this document. Compare it line-by-line with the page in your browser window. Do you see how all the formatting tags work?

Step 4 If you don't already have image files for your page, you can download some from other Web pages. Use your common sense to decide which images you're allowed to use and which ones you shouldn't. Images provided by NASA, for example, are for the public's use. A corporate logo is private property. If you're looking for some astronomical images, you might try NASA’s list of Astronomy Pictures of the Day.

Depending on what kind of computer and browser you're using, you'll have to use a slightly different procedure to download an image onto your hard drive. Here's how you would do it on a Macintosh computer, using a Safari browser:

1. Use your mouse to position the pointer over the image.
2. Hold down the button on the mouse and drag the image to your computer’s desktop.
3. Let go of the button, and you'll see a small icon. The image has now been downloaded onto your hard drive. If you decide to change the name of the file, make sure your new name ends in .gif or .jpg (This will be important if you use the image in your own Web page).
4. Click on the icon to view the image as it would appear on your Web page.
While you're searching for images, don't download every one you see. You'll take up a lot of space on your hard drive if you grab dozens of images. Select just a few -- perhaps your own "Top Five" list -- that you think are the best for your page.

Step 5 Now you're ready to insert the formatting tags in your own document. Remember to start your document with and end it with . The "title" that you type between the tags will appear at the very top of the browser window when your page is being viewed. This title might be, but doesn't have to be, the same as the header at the top of your page.

Step 6 Now it's time to see how well your formatting has worked. Save your text document (Remember: "Text Only," and the file name should end in .html or .htm) and go back to the browser. Under the File menu, select "Open File..." or "Open Local...". From there you should be able to find your document's name and click on "Open". Your document will appear in your window, looking like a real live Web page!

Don't be discouraged if there are some problems at first. HTML formatting requires a lot of attention to tiny details. If something doesn't look the way you expected, make a note of it and go back to your text document to adjust it. Then save the document again, go back to the browser, and click on "Reload". You'll probably have to go back and forth like this many times before your page looks perfect to you.

Step 7 Your school may or may not have an account with an Internet provider that allows you to put your Web page on a server so that other people can read it. If not, you can just keep practicing with documents on your computer's hard drive. Or, you might look into getting some free Web space for yourself or your school. Some sites that provide this service are listed in the Idea Bank at the bottom of this page.

If you are able to put your page up on a server, how will anyone find it? Unless they know about your page already -- and know the exact URL! -- they won't be able to visit it. Here are three ways you can give people a roadmap to your location on the information superhighway:
Find some other Web sites that are related to your page in some way. They might be sites that deal with the same topic or are published by students your age. Write to the people who maintain these pages and ask them to check out your site. If they like it, they might add a link to your page on theirs.

Register your site with a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Once you've added your URL to one of these databases, people who are interested in the general topic of your page will get a listing of your site when they do a search. For example, in Yahoo, navigate through their categories until you get to the one that best suits your page, and then click on "Add URL." You'll be asked to provide the title of your page, its URL, and a comment or short sentence that describes what's on the page. In your comment, try to include words that you think an interested person might type in as key words when doing a Yahoo search. "Jupiter facts and images" or "Book reviews by middle school students" are examples of good comments.

The Beginner's A-Z Guide to Starting/Creating Your Own Website

"Passion Is All You Need To Be A Web Designer"

Imagination Web Design


Web designing doesn't follow any particular rule book. It's like any designing format which should be expressive, appealing and informative. But it's not that easy to understand your visitor's choice. Something which is appealing to you might not appeal your visitor.

Hence, there are certain guidelines which you should always try to follow while plotting a website. These guidelines basically talk about the content and graphics.Before designing your web page, you visit numerous web sites; some with good content, some bad and some with a balanced content and graphics. But you must have liked those sites which successfully hold your attention and curiosity. Following are the two web designing myths which are widely followed by the web designers.

Content Supremacy

A well known ad age says 'Content is the King', and it is true to some extent. But can content alone hold attention? What if visitor is in a hurry, or don't want to give time to read the content? Then all your content supremacy will be unwanted. Visitor might look for animations or other interfaces to explore the site.

However, it's better to put enough information in the site, but it should not look dull to the visitor. Applets and interfaces can be used to make your site more attractive. Only content lacks the needed appeal in your site, which can deter your visitor. Your website should have a perfect balance of animation and content to become popular among your target audience.When are these applets required?

Sometimes these interfaces are required to establish the relation between the brand and the target audience - for example, the Yahoo Mail's latest beta version that shows a dummy slender lad interacting with the audience. This becomes more interesting when the page shows loading, the constant boxing practice with the shadow of the lad holds interest. This is easily downloaded and it gives an extra zing to the normal mailing WebPages.

Similarly, interfaces, applets can be used in comic, gaming and other interactive websites, where you want your audience to adhere to your site. Web design, like any other designing, has no hard and fast rule. It follows a simple philosophy that is the taste of the target audience. You may have a static or a dynamic website, but it should aptly cater to the target audience.

Graphic Dominance

There is another school of thought, who believes that a website looks attractive only when you put lots of graphics in it. They believe all the applets and interfaces make your site look spectacular and attractive. You might often come across these kind of sites, for example, if a newcomer or web designing student makes any website, who is almost unaware of the real market, will put all his book knowledge and technology to make a website, result, a heavy and adorned site.

This makes the site heavy to load, and you might loose your visitor because of this. Hence there should be a balance between the graphics and the content. You certainly can't afford to have hundred kilobyte animated graphics in your website, which is certainly a useless adornment. Large graphics take longer to load because the download speed depends on your modem. If you have a hundred kilobyte graphic and your visitor has a low modem, then your graphic can take ages to load, which is certainly a strict no for your website's popularity.

These graphics are purely decorative and you should restrict yourself while using them. Graphics should be place at the appropriate place; they can enhance the text but, without content graphics is like body without a soul. Undoubtedly, graphics make a page interesting and more desirable, but heavy decoration can destroy the gist of your site. Hence your site should have a blend of graphics and content. Decorative and small pages are always desirable but if your page has too much graphics and takes long to be loaded then it can be unbearable.

- Imagination Web Design

"The easiest way to promote your websites"

Promoting/Advertising your Websites

My internet Business-Articles Are The Quickest Way To Your Customers Wallet

One way of promoting your website and product can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this “free” method can boost your sites and sales, doubling and even tripling your income.

Articles. One of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does this work?

Write articles relating to your website and submit them to “free content” submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.

If they do, your article will include a link back to your site. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.

As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site increases also. Major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site.

The more incoming links the website has, the more importance search engines attaches to it. This will then increase your website’s placement in the search results.

If you site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

There are also those who already have specific things they need on their mind but cannot decide yet between the many choices online. Chances are, they may stumble upon one of your articles, gets interested by the contents you wrote, go to your site and became enticed by your promotions. See how easy that is?

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own website’s topic. So once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles that you have written.

And to think, no effort on your part was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.

It is no wonder why many webmasters are suddenly reviving their old writing styles and taking time to write more articles about their site than doing other means of promotion.

Getting their site known is easier if they have articles increasing their links and traffic and making it accessible for visitors searching the internet. Since many people are now taking their buying needs online, having your site on the search engines through your articles is one way of letting them know about you and your business.

The good thing with articles is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with a little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content site. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.

Try writing some articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your earnings.

Nothing like getting benefits for something you got for free.

"Web Hosting"

Components of Good Web Hosting

Everything seems so confusing when one makes a start to acquire a site on internet.




The obtuse acronyms and definitions that flow freely through the 'Beginner Friendly' information sites may at times become hard to come across. The principal reason behind this is the Internet and also the simplicity of the process of getting a website online, and

people hardly think of the difficulty they once had after getting past the first stumbling steps, as a result of which they are unable to understand the next wave of dot com newbie’s

So we begin by defining some of the basic terms that are seen commonly when we start looking for a web host. One will promptly realize that computer geeks are fond of using big words for simple concepts. What else can one expect from a group of people who decided to quote half a Byte as a Nibble?

Web Host: These are the people who provide a website which can be accessed .These people are a good treasure of information, it proves to be quite worthy to get ones queries answered by contacting their tech support. This fact makes it important to contact them BEFORE one sign’s up for any packages to guarantee reception of a timely response. One can try sending an email their way and see the outcome.

Disk Space: This is equivalent to the space on ones own PC's hard drive. Web Hosts usually assign a definite amount of space to ones website, usually in Megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB). It helps in finding out how much one can store on ones site.

Bandwidth: The quantity of data that can be retrieved from ones site within the bandwidth period is termed as Bandwidth .The bandwidth period is the measure of the duration of time before ones bandwidth gets reset once again, which is usually about a month. Bandwidth is also measured in MB and GB, similar to disk space. Before purchasing a hosting package it is always advisable to find out the effects of exceeding ones allocated bandwidth.

Domain Name: Everyone identified by a domain name on the Internet. One has to type the domain name into a web browser's address bar to reach ones site. It depends whether ones hosting company offers a domain for free, or it has the facilities to provide a domain for a minimal cost.

SQL (MySQL, SQL Server etc.): Structured Query Language. Interaction with the databases is done using SQL.Chances are that when one start looking for web hosting one have no knowledge of SQL, and have no need of knowing it for at least a little while longer.

HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. Basically, how the Internet works. The protocol that administers the transfer of web pages from one place to another is HTTP.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language. This is (usually) used directly or indirectly when one makes his own website. Don't get afraid by the name, the 'language' is very easy to learn.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol. It is a protocol used for transferring pages and files from ones home PC to a server. It is easy to use and if ones host uses this method for file access it will provide the login information. FTP can be used by typing "FTP://" into My Computer on a windows box and it helps to access ones server as if it were a regular windows folder.

POP3: This is a common email 'post box' system. It is use to store emails for retrieval.

SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It is a common protocol used to send emails.

A beginner does not need to know too much about the above two email technologies. If they're listed, well. It implies one have email account with ones own website (i.e. the email name@yourdomain.com will reach him/her somehow)

Java, Perl, ASP, .NET, PHP are some of the languages used to enhance websites. A started should try learning HTML first before worrying to learn about these advanced languages. Generally they're not too difficult to learn, but one will want a strong basing before tackling them.

The Internet is a wonderful source of knowledge, so whenever one wants information just fire up the favorite search engine and type in the problem. The Internet is full of sites about the Internet, so the information one want shouldn't be too hard to find.

Building professional websites takes a lot of time and skill, so many companies hire people to do it for them. If this is the situation that one is in, talk to the designer he/she is hiring about hosting, as they may have struck a deal with a webhost to provide clients with cheaper hosting packages. Also, the professional designer will know what features one is going to need in a hosting plan.

The world of web hosting is not as complex as people assume it to be. One has to make sure that a little bit of research is necessary before diving in and then there will be less chances of one getting burned by a shifty 'here today, gone tomorrow' company. Check out the host's rankings on a few Web Hosting Directories, do a search for reviews of the company, contact the support staff before signing up and enjoy the world opened by having ones own online presence.

"What should one look for to choose the Right Web Host"

Whatever type of website one wants to host, choosing the correct host can be complicated. Many of the hosting companies offer much more than one will ever be able to use, high-end packages are recommended for small websites by their sales staff.

One should be cautious while choosing, one might require opportunity to expand but before contacting a company’s sales department; one should have a look at the size of his/her website. If one’s requirement is 10MB then there is no need of 1&1s Home package with 800MB for £4.99 a month!

Factors like price and disk space are not enough to consider when one makes his/her choice of a host. Monthly transfer is the amount of information that can be moved by both visitors and person hosting the site; uploading and downloading files may form a part of monthly transfer. Monthly transfer is also called as bandwidth and is gradually consumed up by every visit. Many hosts often offer more space then transfer! One should not get caught.

Database is an essential requirement when one is planning to install a forum or a content management system. Windows and Linux based hosts both manage MySQL databases, but as Linux being more efficient is often appreciated much. Hosts should charge a small fee for addition of an extra database to one’s account , but one needs to find out how many are included and what will be the cost of upgrades before deciding on whom to hand one’s money too.

One should use a company which is known to be trustworthy, whether one comes to know by someone using those companies or have heard of their good services.