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The material on this website does not constitute professional advice and is used at your own risk
Website designed and constructed by Helen Priddle, © Helen Priddle 2008-2009 Page last updated January 2009 |
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WARNING: For the Computer Literate! If you are fairly computer literate: you know what a hyperlink is and you usually find you can learn to use a new computer program without recourse to the instruction manual, then it’s my guess that you can build your own site. The process involves 4 steps:
1. Choose a webhosting service– the company that will hold your web pages on their server and broadcast your pages onto the net. For example, I chose Streamlinenet. There will be a range of products on offer, and for a simple website you’ll probably need only the cheapest. The only reason to choose a more expensive package is if you want a lot of e-mail addresses or if you are planning to put a lot of data on your site (e.g. more than 250MB). 2. Think up a domain name for your site (e.g. mine: humanistic.co.uk) and start the process of setting up your domain with the webhost. They will take you through the process of finding a unique name, and registering it for the first two years with the UK register of web domains (Nominet). They will then charge you for hosting your site with them, and will begin preparing space for your website. 3. Make your pages. There are many programs out there to help you do it. I use Microsoft Publisher as its included in the Microsoft Office Professional Suite. 4. Upload your pages onto the webhost server. I use the freeware ftp surfer program to do this. You will need the details from the webhost of the address where you will be uploading to via ftp (file transfer protocol), and what your username and password are to connect to that space. You may need some help from your webhost support pages to know which folder you need to put the files in for them to be broadcast. YOU’RE ON THE WEB!!! 5. If you want people to find your site through search engines, you need to know that there are two types of search engines:
· The first, like Google, uses a robot to crawl from one site to another following links. If you can get other sites to link to yours, this will help. Also, you can tell Google where your site is by setting up a sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools. · The second, like Yahoo, uses a directory of sites. This is a system of categorising sites by type, e.g. ‘entertainment’ or ‘shopping’ and then subcategories within those. You can suggest your site to be included in the directory. For example, with Yahoo Suggest a Site.
Here are some sites I have built in this way:
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