article: website DIY: creating a website yourself

Do's

• Optimise images for the web
• Keep images as small as is necessary to convey their message
• Limit the number of fonts you use
• Use only browser friendly fonts: the fonts on your PC are not necessarily on everyone else's
• Use families of browser friendly fonts rather than specifying a single font
• Design the navigation carefully: it can provide an overview of your whole site
• For security reasons, upload any database to a part of the server that is not within the www directory tree
• Test your site, and check all links for broken links
• You must be able to use at least one graphics product such a Paint Shop Pro, PhotoShop etc

Don't

• Don't include pointless animations
• Avoid using Marquees (moving text): it is not easy to read, and visitors will often not wait while the text scrolls by
• Be aware that animations distract the visitor while they are trying to read your text. Which message are you trying to convey: the animation or the text?
• Don't use Access if your site will have a very high concurrent database hit rate
• Don't make your pages too visually complex: the message will get lost
• The Internet has lots of free scripts that do novel things: don't use them in your site just because you found them
• Don't take a visitor away from your site when they click a link: instead, open the link in a new browser window

things you may not know

• Microsoft Notepad could have been used to create all the HTML based sites on the Internet
• Many web designers use Notepad and write HTML code directly
• If you right click a web page and select 'View Source' you will be able to see the HTML code that created the site
• Meta tags are less necessary now that search engines have become more intelligent
• There are web standards: for example W3C
• There are worldwide Payment Card Industry standards which limit what information you hold about credit cards. You must observe these
• You can create legal liabilities for yourself by linking to other sites
• You can code web pages in HTML or Flash or a mixture. HTML is the most common and is the standard approach
• If you want to use fonts that are not browser friendly you can put them in an image: by doing that it doesn't matter if they are not installed on the visitor's PC
• You must design your pages so that they look good even if the visitor changes the size of their browser window
• The eye has difficulty reading lines which are more than two alphabets long
• If you have a technical problem then someone has had it before you: search Google using a variety of key words and change their order to get different results returned
• You don't need to know how to code in XML
• You can speed up download times by externalising scripts and style sheets, and preloading roll-over images
• Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape work differently and you have to take account of this if you use Javascript in the webpage. (In technical terms they use different Document Object Models!)
• Unless you take special precautions web robots can extract email addresses from your site and SPAM you.
• If a site doesn't have 'Copyright' on it, it doesn't mean that the information or images are public domain or free to use: copyright laws still apply.

technical skills you may require

You will need to be able to code in:

• HTML for web pages
• CSS for style sheets

It is highly likely that you will need also to use:

• DHTML: this controls, for example, what happens when visitors click things on your web pages
• Javascript (and you must know what an Object Model is and how it works)

If writing database based sites you can use:

• On an Windows/IIS Web Server: ASP, Access, Microsoft SQL
• On an Linux/Apache Web Server: PHP, mySQL

Other languages you can use on the web are:

• Python
• Perl

Miscellaneous stuff:

• You will need to know how to insert an e-mail link into HTML code
• You will need to know how to use FTP in order to load your website to the server
• You will need to know how to set up DNS so that your domain name points to your server

And finally...

It is fun to write your own website, but can you give it the features it needs to look professional or download quickly?

Getting it done by a neighbour or friend can lead to problems of maintaining your site when they loose interest: and all the world can still see your site.