Building a Web Site

Da' Basics:

Many of us are blown away by the seemingly complex operation of building our first Web site. In reality, it's a fairly simple operation if you pay attention to just a couple of basic things.

First of all, Web site design begins long before the first keystroke or mouse click occurs to start the actual page construction. It starts with basic planning. Ask yourself three questions:

1. What is it you want your site to accomplish?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What materials will I need to accomplish the task?

Once these questions are answered, it becomes a matter of filling in the blanks.

Site Organization:

The single most common mistake that new Web designers make is that they build a site on their machine (aka: local) that doesn't mirror the exact construction of the site on their Web host (aka: remote). If this happens, links, image calls, etc. will end up driving the neophyte designer up a wall. Here's how to prevent that:

1. Open Windows Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer) by right clicking the "Start" button and choosing "Explore".
2. Scroll to the top of the Explorer screen until you can see the entry for your local hard drive: "Local Disk (C:)".
3. Click it once to select it.
4. At the top of the Explorer window, click: File-->New-->Folder. Don't get impatient. For some reason this operation takes a bit longer than we expect it to in Windows. Also, don't make any more keystrokes until the highlighted"New Folder" thingy-dingy shows up in your Explorer window.
5. Without deleting anything, type the name for your site. It can be anything that means something to you. It won't appear anywhere in the site or online. It's just a place to keep your stuff. When finished entering the name, press, "Enter".
6. Locate the new folder and double-click it to open it. Don't worry if it's empty. It should be at this point.
7. In the left hand panel of Explorer, click the new folder once to select it.
8. From the menu bar at the top of the page, select: File-->New-->Folder.
9. When the new folder appears, type: images.
10. If you haven't already done so, use your FTP client to make an 'images' folder in the main (root) directory of your site.

Congratulations! You've defined a basic site structure that will carry you through many, many moons. The way it works is:

• You will place all of your pages (.html) files (as well as any others you wish to have available for download) in the main directory of your site on your machine. Any images that you use will be placed in the 'images' folder.
• You build your pages, setting the links and calling the image files by browsing to the appropriate folder and selecting the file (Netscape Composer and others).
• When the time comes to FTP them up to your host, you simply put the .html files in the main directory and the images in the images folder. All of your links continue to function and everything is hunky-dory! (He said, confidently!)

Enjoy!