How To Get
Your Own Web Site

This is a quick, very basic rundown about putting up a web site, for those who are mostly unfamiliar with the process. I can advise on, assist with, more fully explain, or actually do any of the steps listed below -- just write or call.

If you're thinking of getting a site but are unfamiliar with the Internet, you should be aware that their are cheaper — often free — ways of putting your text and pictures on the Net. For instance, there are sites like MySpace (www.myspace.com) which provide their members with pages on which they can put pictures, personal information, and other kinds of text. There are also blogs (web logs) which are designed to enable their users to write and publish journals, which can usually include pictures. If you just want to publish pictures, there are sites like Flickr (www.flickr.com) or YouTube (www.youtube.com) for videos. If you want to sell something, there's eBay (www.ebay.com). Besides the sites I've named, all of these have numerous competitors. I'm assuming you've checked these out and prefer a site of your own.

First, the bureaucracy and the price tag. If you don't have it already, you probably want to have some kind of regular connection to the Internet, for example AOL, Earthlink, Panix, or possibly your local telephone company (which is usually cheaper) to look at, modify and generally manage your site. You can have either an ordinary dial-up connection or what is called DSL or broadband (in some areas), which is much faster, more susceptible to problems, and costs more. In some areas you can get a high-speed connection through cable. The dialup connection runs $15-$20 (in addition to your ordinary telephone charges). DSL as provided by some companies has become almost as cheap. There are some yet cheaper services but they sometimes make up the difference by inserting advertising in sent or received material. Sometimes, you can get free web site space along with broadband, so this might be a consideration. Dialup is adequate for web site maintenance. (In theory you could do without an Internet connection, but then you would not be able to see your own site, make changes, get email, and so on.)

Second, you will probably want to get what's called a domain name, for instance, "www.this-is-a-domain-name.com". The domain name has to be one that no one else is using yet (unless you want to buy one from somebody). This is the address by which people will get to your web site from anywhere on the Internet. It can cost as much as $35 per year from the major registration company in the business and usually you have to pay for the first two years in advance. However, there are also some much cheaper registration services that appear to work properly -- see two paragraphs below, where I discuss site hosting.

You can sometimes get a cheaper deal by not having your own domain name but setting up your web site under someone else's domain. In that case, instead of viewers typing "www.mydomainname.com" into their browser, they'll have to type something like "www.zzizz.com/~mysitename" This will discourage many -- where's the '~' key? -- but it may be adequate for your purposes.

Third, you need someone to host the web site -- that is, keep the files available online in a computer with a high-speed Internet connection for people to look at using web browsers. The low end of this service (as to price, not necessarily as to service) now seems to be hovering between $6 and $8 per month -- sometimes less if bought by the year -- and there is a considerable variety of providers. There are even cheaper hosting services but many tend to do annoying things like go offline, not send the web pages very fast, or put advertising on the pages. If your material is under someone else's domain then the site may be much cheaper or even free. If you already have an Internet connection and are familiar with using a web browser, it might be good to look at http://www.webhostingratings.com, especially the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page and the Gotchas page. This site also discusses registration. Both site hosting and registration are areas where there is a good deal of competition and change. Besides webhostratings, there are a number of web host review pages and even some web-host-review review pages on the Net, for instance:

• http://www.findmyhost.com/
• http://www.upperhost.com/
• http://www.hostfind.com/
• http://www.webhostmagazine.com/bg/
• http://www.hostcritique.com/
• http://www.besthostratings.com/
• http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/
• http://www.webhostinginspector.com/
• http://web-hosting-services.topchoicereviews.com/

People sometimes ask me whether it is better to have a web host which is geographically close to where they live. I don't think it makes any difference, at least within the continental U.S. and Canada, because connectivity and bandwidth are now pretty much the same in all the places a commercial web host service is likely to be located.

I can go through both the registration and the site selection and acquisition on behalf of or with a client. However, in many cases it is a good idea to do as much as possible for yourself because then you will start out with a direct business relationship with the providers from the beginning, instead of having to go through me or someone else to solve a business problem. Often, you'll find that the site host you select will do the registration for you. (Note that it takes several days for the registration to be completed -- the process isn't instantaneous.)

Once you have a domain name and a site host, you need somebody to create the pages that make up the site for you (or do it yourself). This is what I specialize in. The average low end for small-scale custom site creation, last time I looked, was about $500 for which you get five or six pages with pictures, your own designs and appearance, and so on. You can also find automatic page-creation programs which will permit you to create the site on your own. There are also cheaper services but they tend to use cookie-cutter industrial software and methods, which as in many other areas of production enable them to cut their labor costs at the expense of individuality. That means that the site looks pretty much like a lot of other sites, which you may or may not want. And it may mean that you will be stuck with the software or company that created the site forever (or have to start over). Needless to say, larger and more complex sites generally cost more.

Outside of a routine job of making up a basic site, contractors usually charge around $100 per page for completely new pages, $25 to modify an existing page, and $100 per hour for other work, although, again, you may find people who will work more cheaply. In fact, if you ask around you may well find people who will do the work for little or nothing and not do a bad job, but this is also true of plumbing and auto mechanics and is somewhat risky in all three cases (although the plumbing and auto-mechanic risks are more severe). These charges are probably similar to what you'd pay for design work on a print publication.

Because the pages exist and are displayed on computers, it is possible to construct sites which have ingenious and perhaps impressive animations and other visual and even auditory effects. However, setting these up is time-consuming and therefore usually pretty expensive, and often technologically advanced displays will not work properly on older browsers and computers, which is what a lot of people actually have. Also, many people find elaborate effects irritating rather than attractive, especially if they get in the way of what the viewer wants from the site, like information. Much will depend on your concept of the typical or desired viewer of the site; art galleries, for instance, often feel an overpowering need to use arty animations to show how cool they are, where as a bank or a plumber might prefer a more sober presentation. Studies have shown that while viewers decide almost immediately whether they like a site based on its visual appearance, there is no known consistent design formula that is guaranteed to attract and hold viewers.

Many site operators are interested in making sales and collecting money directly through their web pages with the product sometimes also being delivered through the site (for example, pictures, video, music, software, texts). There are many possibilities and many solutions; the subject is complex enough to be beyond the scope of this description. When looking for web hosting, note whether the operators also provide "shopping cart" or "store" software, and whether it is free or requires a separate payment. Taking in money over the Internet will require either a PayPal (or similar) account, or a credit card account. PayPal is fairly easy to set up, credit cards more complicated. On the other hand you may already take credit cards, in which case your service provider should be able to tell you how to process credit card payments via your web site.

Besides selling goods and services, site owners sometimes make money (or at least try to) by selling ad space on their sites. This page, for instance, has an ad slot provided by Google, which is visible at the bottom of the page, unless your browser blocks it. (Most browsers can now recognize and block advertising.)

Finally, regardless of what you put on your site, you will probably need someone to do some maintenance. For instance, most sites provide a way for the viewer to send email to the site's owner (you). You will want someone to look at this email every day to respond to business inquiries. A lot of people who have sites seem to forget about this, which leads to the prospective customer/client/contact/etc. getting annoyed and going elsewhere. Also, the site should be set up so that someone who is not a computer expert can make minor changes to things like prices, dates, and so on. (This is the way I try to do things.) In general I think it is a positive detriment to set up a site and then let it become obsolete and not pay attention to it. It would be better not to do anything.

You may want to be able to make more extensive changes to your site. The extent to which you can modify a web site is going to be dependent to some extent on your technical knowledge, just like fixing a car or remodeling a house. If all that is necessary is the addition of text, it is easy to set up the site so that the text can be simply typed in a window on the site and transferred to the desired page with a mouse click (as with a guestbook). This is about the simplest case. A slightly more complicated case is that of modifying the existing text on a page. In this case, it would be necessary to download (copy to your PC) the page's HTML source (the text and the coding which formats it, which is called HTML), then use a text editor to make the desired changes, and upload (copy) the file to the site. You would not have to know HTML, but would have to avoid harming what was there. Some hosts have web pages which assist with this procedure, or may make it possible to edit the page directly on the site. A yet more sophisticated stage would be to start writing your own HTML. Of course, if you can do this, you can create not only new pages but a whole web site.

The case of graphics -- the pictures on your pages and the files which represent them on the server -- is a bit more complicated still, because graphics, whether photographs, drawings, graphs, icons, or something else, must usually be worked on in a graphics editor to make sure they're the right size and file type and look the way you want them to look. Also, a certain amount of coding may be necessary to give the picture a good position and appearance on the web page. Simple graphics editors are often provided along with digital cameras, or you can obtain one as a separate piece of software -- the one I have used for most of the ETAOIN web site, Paintshop Pro, is currently listed around $125. However, since the company that makes it was bought out by Corel, there does not seem to have been a lot of development of this editor. The industry leader is Adobe Photoshop, which generally costs three or four times as much but has more power and is pretty much an industry standard. Outside of this special editing, the procedure is the same as in the case of changed text: download the picture or pull it out of your files or off your scanner; make the changes; upload it to the site. If it's a new picture you'll have to insert at least a little HTML code to make it possible for the viewer to see and click on a link to the picture.

I mentioned blogs above. You can have a blog on a web site devoted to blogs, but you can also have one on your own web site. Most web hosts now provide the capacity and software to set up a blog. Most blog systems allow readers to respond, possibly under the blogger's editorial control. If you think you have something to say to the world more or less continually, this is an excellent approach. However, the blog will require your attention -- you are going to be the content provider and maintainer. There is not much point in starting a blog unless you plan to provide plenty of content.

Once you have the site working, it's a good idea to inform the Net's various search and directory services about it, so that people will find you when they use these tools. These services want to know about new sites, and make it easy to tell them, usually by directing your browser to a form on their site. However, some of them also offer superior placement (nearer the top of their lists) for a fee. The fee may be worth it if you're selling a common product, probably not if you expect people to look you up by your name or an uncommon product name. The more respected search engines, like Google, do not offer superior placement and in fact make an effort to frustrate designers who try to manipulate the search results. However, they do have an arrangement whereby targeted ads may be purchased and appear alongside search results. There are also people who offer to sell secret techniques to get higher placement in search results. Often, these techniques are fictional. Others that do exist are well known to those who manage the search engines and are neutralized by the searching process, and some of them will cause your domain to be permanently excluded from any search result. Therefore, I don't recommend them.

What you get for all this is a web site, which will probably function in your business or career something like a glossy brochure, magazine, or catalog which introduces people to your work visually, tells and shows them what you have to offer, and gives them an easy means to contact you or get to your office (you can put in a map) or even order things directly. In my experience it does not lead to a big onslaught of business any more than a glossy brochure does, but nevertheless it's good to have and in normal commerce probably at least pays for itself. It is also handier to distribute than a brochure because the viewer does most of the work of getting it -- all you have to do is put a line giving your domain name on a business card or in an advertisement. For most kinds of business, a web site works best in conjunction with other means of contact with customers and the public in general, like mass media advertising, postcards and flyers, posters, "brick and mortar" presence (that is, real, physical stores, offices, galleries), and direct contact.