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Writing and Publishing, Part 41:
Becoming your own publisher:
Marketing:
Creating a website:
Tools:
This is the last of a set of interrelated pieces on websites.
I am meticulous and I pay close attention to detail. I'm also
a pain in the butt. Other than that, I'm probably no different
than you, but I did build this website you're looking at. When
I started I didn't know anything about HTML or any other special
language or protocol. I still don't! I simply knew what I wanted
my website to look like. That is, I knew what I wanted you to
see when your browser loaded my pages. I had a picture in my mind.
To make you see that picture, I had to learn how to use a couple of dandy tools. One is called PageMill. It's a product of Adobe systems, designed to help ordinary folks build websites. I bought PageMill a long time ago and I suspect it is no longer available. I believe it has been superceded by an Adobe product called GoLive.
The other program I use is WS_FTP from Ipswitch. It's a program for uploading and maintaining websites once they are created. There are links to both of these suppliers on the Wesoomi weblinks page.
It is not necessary to learn how to code in HTML. There are several tools for building websites. Microsoft offers one called FrontPage. I use Adobe PageMill because it was the first one I came across when I started looking. I'm sure there are many others. I cannot make a recommendation for any particular one. I simply don't know enough.
Now, read this whole paragraph before you act. Remember, a web page is nothing more than a file with some information and a set of instructions to your browser. To see a sample of this stuff, in Netscape Navigator, right click in this frame and select View, Frame Source. You will be looking at a bunch of HTML code with text in between. To get rid of the view, click on the X in the upper right corner of the window. It's almost the same in Internet explorer except that the keyword is just View, Source. In either case the code is presented in Notepad.
The instructions in HTML tell your browser how to format the data on your monitor. What makes this HTML language unique is that it must allow for the fact that the person creating the pages has no idea what the characteristics of your particular monitor are.
The Adobe site-building program, "PageMill," provides an almost intuitive, drag and drop type of interface for creating these sets of information and instructions. What you see in PageMill is not the source code but the page which you are laying out. If you are a masochist, PageMill will also let you dink with the source code. Do so at your own risk. I'm not going to tell you how to use this program. For one, it would take too much space and time to rewrite the user manual; especially since Adobe has already done a decent job of it. In addition, you will probably be using a different program.
Now, I said that PageMill is almost intuitive. Remember, I do not necessarily recommend the program or its replacement GoLive, but if you do decide to use it you will need to access the user manual. The one thing that ticks me off about the program is that the user manual is on the CD. Now assuming you don't have the luxury of two computers, you will have a choice of switching back and forth between the program and the manual or of printing the manual. It's a rinky dink way to market a product in my opinion. Other than that, PageMill is a cool tool.
You will notice one nice feature about this site which I mention previously. That is the frame on the left side of the screen which does not go away. I call this frame the site link frame. This design allows the viewer to go from page to page at the site and never get lost. You can always get back to the home page. Once this link frame is created, you can design your site around it and add to it easily. The simplest way is to make it a table. You can add rows and update it every day if you like. Keep doing it until you get it the way you want. You can't really hurt anything. Always save a backup copy before you change things.
Here is a point which is not really clear from anything I have read. I found it out the hard way, when a good clever friend bothered to explain to my why my site was not working. Many of the servers on the web are very fussy about file names. I have found the safest procedure is to assume you are in a very primitive world. Use all lower case in your file and folder names and no more than 8 characters. Also use the standard file extensions and forms. Htm or html for the pages. gif or jpg for the graphics.
I need to emphasize one other point which I have noted before. Graphics and animations take a long time to load as compared to text. Most people are impatient. I am terribly impatient. If I clicks on a link and am still looking at a blank page one or two minutes later, I will click the stop button. Then I will select another site to visit. I am not telling you to not have graphics. That could make your site pretty dull. I do suggest that you keep the graphics small. The required file format is gif or jpg. The resolution should be no more that 75 dpi (dots per inch). That's better than a monitor can display at best.
One other thing which I found confusing in building the Wesoomi site is what the term website refers too. In most things I have read, the writer did not bother to differentiate properly between local and remote. When you first build a website, you build it on your own hard drive. This is the "local" site. This local site will be fully functional. It's just that no one else can see it. For it to be accessible to the folks you want to impress, you must create a "remote" site by uploading your local files to a network server somewhere and giving it and address.
The nifty tool I discovered for doing this is called WS_FTP. Don't ask me what the characters mean. I don't even care. This program will show you two, side by side, windows much like the Microsoft Explorer windows that you are used to. One is a diagram of you computer. The other is a diagram of your remote site. Using this program to upload your site is a simple matter of selecting files and clicking an arrow. You upload the HTML files in ASCII and the graphic files in binary. It really is that simple. For a site the size of Wesoomi's this process takes a few minutes.
The difficult part of this program is in the initial setup. In order for it to access your remote site, it must have certain proprietary information. Some of it is information which you create, like user ID and password. Some of it is information which will be known only to your service provider. They must tell it to you before you can set up your remote site. Once that's done, the program should remember it and not bother you again. Just the same, it's a good idea to write that crap down somewhere. It's pretty cryptic stuff and hard to remember.
One additional note. The first thing you will do after you upload the files is check out your site to make sure it works remotely the same way it did locally. You will use your web browser to do this, typing in the URL just as you would enter any other URL. Make sure all the links do what you thought they would. Then send E-mail to your friends telling them to check out your swell stuff.
That's all I have to offer about websites. Next time I will
talk about creating a product catalog.
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