There is a lot of information on web design at Nottingham’s
Central Library at Angel Row (2nd Floor), which will help you
get going with building your own website.
You can also “Google” a whole range of topics …
Free hit counters,
Mouse rollovers
Free clocks
Search engine optimisation
Adding a Flickr badge
Creating a banner photo (like the one above)
Web design for the more advanced designer
Mistakes in web design
.. or have a look at Wikipedia for things like
HTML
web design colour charts
jpeg and gif images
You can have a look at the design of other people’s websites
by doing a right mouse click on any web page, and then
clicking on “View Source”. You can also download photos by
doing a right mouse click and then clicking on “Save Picture
As”. You mustn’t republish anything or use another person’s
design without the website owner’s permission however, or
you could receive a nasty solicitor’s letter or end up in
court.
A lot of photos have a digital watermark imprinted in them by
stock photo companies, which use robots to search the internet
for them to check up on who is using their photos. So you
must pay for using photos to companies such as iStock, or
more simply, take your own digital photos… even poor quality
ones can look good as a background photo for a web-page, or
as a small gif photo. So get out there and take some nice
digital photos of people, animals, places, buildings,
materials, textures, etc, to go on your site.
If you wish to buy a domain name or some webspace for yourself,
here are a couple of websites that I’ve found helpful …
www.easily.co.uk
www.heartinternet.co.uk (this one is based in Nottingham, at
Highfields Science Park).
Their helpdesks were very good, when I wanted some info about
using their services. A basic web-hosting package from Heart
is costing me about £47 a year, and a UK domain name £5 a year,
which I think is very reasonable.
As regards an FTP tool to get your website up from your
computer to the internet, I can recommend the free version of
FTP Commander 8.0. This is for personal use rather than
business use, by the way. Having problems setting things up
with your FTP? The answers are likely to be there for you on
the internet, as other people will have had similar
difficulties... or read/contact the Help section of your web-
hosting (or internet) company.
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You may like to have a look at two websites I’ve set up…
www.dhcounselling.co.uk
www.lovelymusicfso.co.uk
… to have a look at the range of other things you can do..
eg… click on a small gif photo which links to a larger jpeg photo
… a link to your own email site (or email site associated with your
domain name).
… a link to Multimap, to show where something is located.
… adding in music files (see music samples on the LMFSO page)
… adding in a link which will take to from the bottom to the top of
a web page (an invisible anchor)
… adding in metatags … hidden text at the top of your index page
which will be picked up by search engine robots. You can see the
metatag info, by doing a right mouse click on the index page
> View Source (and then have a look at the top of the page). You
have to match what words you use with those you have written
on your index page.
Put the letters “addurl” into Google, to advertise your site on
you could sign up for free/paid business directories (eg freeindex).
As regards using free web-hosting with Angelfire as a test-bed
for your design, you can use FTP Commander to post your web
pages onto Angelfire.
First of all you have to register with Angelfire, to acquire a
website address (URL). Keep a note of your registration details
and your new Angelfire URL.
Next open up FTP Commander and click on New Servers, to bring
up the FTP Servers Properties menu.
Now to fill in the boxes….
Server:
Name … angelfire
FTP Server … ftp.angelfire.com
FTP Port … (leave the number as it is)
User:
User ID … (use your Angelfire details .. eg. blog2/mrjohn)
Password: (use the password you used with your email address at
registration)
Leave other boxes as they are.
Press Save on the menu.
To activate Angelfire on FTP Commander … do one/two clicks on the
Server list Angelfire name. You may have to wait 1-2 minutes for
this to work, even if you've got a fast Broadband connection.
Rummage around on the far left hand side to find your website
folder on your computer. Click on the index file (usually
labelled as index.html), click on the centre arrow that points
to the right, to upload it onto the internet. Do the same for
all your other pages and your photos.
Eventually you should be able to view your new site, by putting
your new URL (website address) into the URL box at the top of
the screen. Remember to save this address in your Favourites for
future ease of access.
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Lastly, a quick look at Dreamweaver and Frontpage software for
building websites:
(Prices are for last December, and may have changed since).
Adobe sold Dreamweaver 8 (Sep 2005) for Windows XP users
(£27 from eSoftwareWorld)
The latest version is Dreamweaver CS3 (April 2007)
… this is OK with Windows Vista
(£337 from Amazon)
(People with earlier versions of Dreamweaver are having
problems when they’ve gone over to Windows Vista ... if
you’ve got Windows Vista then you should buy DW CS3).
Microsoft produced its own website builder … Frontpage
The current one is …
Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 (version 11)
(This is part of the Microsoft Office package,
but you can buy it separately for £350 from Amazon)
OK with Windows XP, but is said to be problematic with Windows Vista
Frontpage is being replaced by …
Microsoft Expression Web
& Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer
Frontpage will be discontinued by December 2008, according to what I’ve read.
