Creating your own Website

Transcription

1 Park Street Camera Club Creating your own Website What is a web site A set of interconnected web pages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization. A company or an individual tells you how to get to their Web site by giving you the address of their home page. From the home page, you can navigate to all the other pages on their site. A server is a computer that holds the files for one or more web sites. A very large Web site may be spread over a number of servers in different geographic locations, but more typically it resides on a commercial space provider's server with a number of other sites that have nothing to do with each other. Why would you want a website To share your pictures To sell your photos To share information about you How does the internet work This is a very simple diagram to show how a desktop/laptop computer connects to a website over the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW). It is linked by telephone or cable to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that then routes the connection to the Internet. The user of the computer is able to access different websites/web pages by putting the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or web address, for that webpage into your browser. Your Internet connection would be routed to WWW Server which houses the webpage. This is not straight forward and there are lots of bits of kit in the real internet. This is a trace of my PC accessing the club website. Because the Internet is a global network each computer connected to it must have a unique address. Internet addresses are in the form nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn where nnn is a number from This address is known as an IP number (IP stands for Internet Protocol) and you can see them here. The actual routing is done using these IP numbers and name servers which keep a list of where a page can be found.

2 Web pages are stored as documents containing plain text, photos and graphics interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Web pages are accessed and transported across the network with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), The page is then recreated on the users computer by the web browser, using the HTML markup instructions. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are pretty much interchangeable and both commonly used for the system your website will live on.. Alternative approaches (the pages shown here have not been tested are not recommended and are just examples of what you can find if you do a web search) Buy single page off the self little customisation Buy a framework site which allows lots of customisation Some of these are specifically aimed at Photographers but can have high setup charges and monthly payments however if you want to sell your photos they may be the best bet. It is also possible to produce elements like galleries using Photoshop - John will talk more about this later.

3 Make it yourself and buy a hosting service or host it on your computer We will talk a lot more about this approach in a bit Non Website Alternatives Use a stock image agency Use Flickr If you just want to make your photos available for other people to see this is a free easy to use option but you can do much to make it the way you would like it. Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website 1. Get Your Domain Name The first thing you need to do is to get a domain name which is the name you want to give to your website. To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. Decide what type of name you want :-.com.co.uk.net Then check if it is available. Registration

4 Check if its available with who is site Once you know the name is available pick a registration company and fill in the details. 2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet with high speed connections. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. Web hosts provide a range of services from a basic website to data driven sites and ecommerce. You could host your site on your own PC but! you need extra software on your PC, it has to be left on all the time and will be very slow compared with a commercial host. The same company will often do name registration and hosting and in some cases this may be a requirement..

5 3. Designing your Web Pages Much more on this later. I will create some pages and Martin will talk about what looks good in terms of design. If you want a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor you can down load Front Page Express for free the same site has some tutorials. 4. Testing Your Website You should test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site in all these browsers is the only way you can really be sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines. 5. Getting Your Site Noticed When your site is ready, you can submit it to search engines like Google and Bing so that it appears when people use them to search. You will find information and links about how to do this on their pages. If you want to be at the top of the list you will have to pay! In general, if your site is already linked to by other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines. They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.

6 Now we will make some pages. Make a home page Make some other pages Directory structure You need to decide on your directory structure. A very simple website might be OK in a single directory but its usually better to set up subdirectories for various items such as photos. Be careful to use a path which is portable if you refer to items as c:\home\myweb\firstimage.jpg or the like it will not be found when the page is moved to the web server. FTP The next operation is to move all the elements of your website to your hosts server. For this you will need to use a file transfer protocol ftp. Your hosting service will give you an address and password which will lead to the place which your domain name points to. You should have a directory called www which is where you copy all your files, images etc to

7 making sure you maintain the same directory structure for any subdirectories. You can use specialist software or just set it up within the windows operating system as here. You may find you have several other directories already set up on the server these are for house keeping and other tasks and can generally be ignored at this stage. The home page file should be called index.htm as this is the file the server will run when people first go to your site. You can get them to go direct to other pages by putting the file name in the web address box as we do to get to our members pages. File and directory names can be case sensitive if your host is using UNIX be consistent. Some additional considerations Speed Everyone complains about slow websites. There are many factors which influence this - one you can test easily is your broad band speed. If you are going to host your web site at home this will be the main factor limiting the usability of the site. Most home broadband is asynchronous that means the upload speed is much slower than the download speed it is this speed your users will experience! You can check it using one of the many websites for this purpose.

8 Even when you have a fast connection you still need to think about the size of your image files if they are too big they will take a long time to appear on the users computer. Our competition files average about 1Mb. This is 1,000 kilobytes or 1,000,000 bytes but line speeds are specified in bits not bytes. There are 8 bits needed for 1 byte so our image needs 8,000,000 bits to be transmitted. With my line speed that should only take one second but in practice its much longer. A more usual size for images on the internet would be a maximum of 600 pixels on the longest side. The other reason for keeping the size small is to avoid the image being copied. At 600 pixels any copy would not make a good quality print or stand any enlargement. If you do want to make high resolution images available you should consider water marking them but keep it subtle. You can buy special software to create the water mark but these were created as a layer in Photoshop which could be copied to any image. Resize your images in the usual way before uploading them to the server.

9 ecommerce If you want to sell your photos you will need some way of getting the money. This is complicated but can be done. You do however need to think about security and complying with the various laws and codes of practice that apply. You will need a shopping-cart which you could write or buy a software program or service so you can take orders, calculate delivery costs etc. You will also need to get into automatic to send order notifications etc and all this will almost inevitably need a backend database! Your will then need an internet merchant account from your bank, allowing you to accept credit card payments online. Then you need a payment gateway account, which is an online processor that hooks into both your customers credit card account and your internet merchant account. The gateway verifies information, transfers requests and authorizes credit cards in real time. You will have to get this from a commercial provider. If you dont want that much hassle ebay offers a storefront solution called ProStores which offers a full-featured, customisable web store. Unlike ebay Stores, ProStores sites are accessed through a URL unique to the seller and have no ebay branding. PayPal also provide payment solutions. There are lots of other possibilities. You may want to include some form of communication in your web site like a contact form or having address associated with the web site like we have on the PSCC site. Our hosting company provides a forwarding service. They have an server running and the s come in to them and they then send them on to the usual address of the person. To use a contact form also requires them to set up this service and then the information entered on forms is sent back to a database on their server and converted to an and sent to our club contacts.