How to Build a Web Site

Course outline

Part I

What is a web site?

• a collection of files on a computer known as a "web server".

• the site is made of individual files containing links to each other. These individual files are known as "web pages".

• web pages are files saved with the ".html" or ".htm" file extension.

• the "home page" of your web site will be named "index.html".

How do I make a web page?

• using the "sitebuilder" in the "control panel" of your hosting account or

• using an editor like NVU (free, open source) or DreamWeaver (professional).

• uploading the files you make to your site, also known as "publishing".

Photos and graphics considerations

Studies over the last three years have shown that your visitors make judgments about your business within the first two seconds of being on your site.

• file sizes and why you need to edit photographs and graphics.

• a "kilobyte" is a measurement of size. A "megabyte" = approximately 1,000 kilobytes.

• a kilobyte is also known as "KB" or simply, "k". A megabyte is also known as "MB" or "meg".

• a file that is 100KB will take approximately 3 minutes to download on a standard dial-up connection and about 5 seconds on a cable/dsl connection.

• a 1MB file will take approximately half an hour to download on a standard dial-up connection and about 10 minutes on a cable/dsl connection.

• the trick is to keep the file size as small as possible while retaining as much quality as possible.

• Free image-editing software: GetPaint.NET

Forms

• How forms work.

• What you need to make forms work.

• What you can and can't ask for.

Marketing

• Content is king!

• Search engines and how they work.

• Listing your site with search engines.

• Effective e-mail newsletters.