Creating your Website

So there you have it in a nutshell. I haven't gone into great detail here, but I hope I've given you some pointers, some useful links and some basic guidelines. Here's a quick 10 step summary:

Find an available domain name Register the domain Chose a web hosting company and an account plan and setup the account Get the nameserver info from your webhosting company (normally they'll send it to you when you sign up with them) Enter the nameserver info in the domain name control panel (which your domain registration company should make available for you) * NOTE: If you get your domain name and host your website with the same company, they will do steps #4 and #5 for you. Design your web site Write and test your web pages on your local PC using an HTML editor or you can use sitebuilder software either locally or running on your webhost's server. If necessary, upload your web pages to your web host account via FTP Submit your site to as many search engines as you can (but especially Google and Yahoo) Repeat #6 - #9 as often as necessary!

Building a simple website with a few pages is really very easy and inexpensive. You can easily do it for under $30/year if you don't have a lot of traffic, and for under $100/year with a reasonable amount of traffic, say a few hundred visitors a day.

Building a large and complex website isn't so easy. It's easy to write the pages, but organizing them all and properly linking and indexing the pages can be tricky. Often a change in one page or an addition of a page means you have to edit several other files. Some of the site building packages (like FrontPage) can handle most of the organization for you. but sometimes they don't do things quite the way you would like!

You can start with a simple design and slowly get more complex, but at some point you'll probably want to redesign the whole site! It's much easier to do this if you start out using style sheets and PLAN your site before starting it. Sites which "just grow" often show that by poor organization and an inconsistant design from page to page. This site (bobatkins.com) still has leftover pages from earlier designs that I'm slowly converting over!

My advice would be to go to a good bookstore and buy a few books (or better, go there, find the books you need, then come back to this site, click on the Amazon links and buy them there!). There are so many books out there that it's hard to give many firm recommendations. A lot depends on how much you already know and the style of book you feel most comfortable with. However one book I'd suggest you take a look at is "Don't make me think - a common sense approach to web usability" by Steve Krugg (see the ad in the left column). It won't teach you how to program in HTML (in fact I'm not sure it even mentions HTML!), but it will teach you some very valuable lessons on how to structure your website and design your human interface so people can actually use it! It's well written, easy to understand and provides very sound advice.

Another excellent book is Jennifer Niederst's " Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond" (see ad on left). It's aimed at beginners and covers the basics of HTML, web design from the ground up. If you're starting from zero and need help with the basics, this is an excellent book

So if you don't have a website, give it a try. It's really not that hard to create one and you can then share your images and your photographic expertise with the world!

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