Felgall Webmaster Links Page

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Stephen Chapman

Webmaster Links

This is a list of some of the steps you might follow in creating a website and some of the sites that I have found that contain useful material. I have used many (but not all) of the services listed to assist in building my site. Many of the sites listed here provide what you need free or in exchange for allowing them to advertise on your site and it is easy to build even a quite complex web site without spending any money at all.
Note that some of these sites provide several of the services mentioned so you need not deal with all of the sites listed in order to get all of the functionality.

If you need more help or want to check out who might do it for you then see the Webmaster Services page.

Build

First you need an email address. If you haven't got one or want one that you can access from any computer connected to the internet then you might consider Hotmail, gMail or perhaps Operamail. You will need an email address in order to connect to many of the following services.
Next you need somewhere to host your website. If your ISP has provided you with some free space (like mine has) then you can get them to host the site for you. If not, then Bravenet is one option that doesn't display too many ads. There is also a search facility available to help you to find a free web host at Freewebspace.

If you are really serious about creating a professional web site then you will want to purchase ad free web hosting and/or pay to get your own domain name to use with your site. compare hosting plans to find one that will get you started.
To create your web pages you need a web editor. Notepad will do (I also use another text editor called SPF/PC). If you want something fancier then there are many HTML editors on the market and a number of free ones as well.
If you don't want to pay to buy a web editors then you might like to download one of the following free web editors - CSE HTML Validator, HTML kit, Kompozer, or just search for "free web editor" in your favourite search engine.
Don't know HTML? Then you will need to learn it unless you take the quick way out of using a program that generates the HTML for you. Even then, it is useful to understand HTML so that you can make the modifications that your generator doesn't cater for (and none of them cater for everything that will be available with the next generation of browsers). There are a number of introductory tutorials on (X)HTML (to define your content) and Stylesheets (which is what you use to define how the content should look) in the HTML and CSS section of this site.
A good source of more advanced information on making your web site more dynamic can be found on my Javascript site at About.com where you will find a series of tutorials on creating simple animations and effects.
Once you have created some pages, you will need a way to validate the pages that you have created to ensure that the HTML code is correct (even the generators make mistakes sometimes). The best way to validate your pages is to use the validator supplied by W3C (the people who wrote the HTML standards manual). Another website with useful validation and optimization tools is NetMechanic.
Note that validation tools do not fix the code for you, they simply tell you where the errors are so that you can fix them yourself.
You should also look at your web page in several different browsers to check that the page displays correctly in each. The popular browsers that you really need to test with are Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera. You might also consider testing with one of the text only browsers such as Lynx.

Enhance

There is no need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to creating Javascripts. There are many useful sources of Javascript freely available on the internet. Apart from my own one at About.com where I have posted many prebuilt scripts and script generators, you should also take a look at The Javascript Source which has many javascripts that you can copy and modify as much as you like. Another similar repository of javascripts can be found at Javascripts.com. You will also find a few complete javascripts that I have made available for you to use in the Javascript Prebuilt Scripts section of this site (along with some hints on how to write your own).
I don't have much Java on this site (only a tutorial on how to use it with your web pages). To start out using Java I suggest that you look for prewritten Java that you can add to your site. I would start by checking out sites like Freeware Java, Gamelan, and Code Guru. If you are looking for online games to add to your site then check out Arcade Games Online.
If you want to go further and actually learn Java then take a look at The Java Tutorial provided by the people who created Java.
You will also want to set up a number of interactive features on your website using either CGI scripts or web pages written using ASP or PHP. Fortunately, you don't need to know anything about how to create any of these or load them to your site particularly as many web hosts don't support them. There are a number of sites on the internet who will allow you to use their services to provide this functionality either free or at a low cost. One of the best of these that provides many free services is Bravenet. Bravenet provide lots of useful features free with little or no advertising including guestbooks, forums, tell a friend, polls, classified ads, free for all links, greeting cards, counters, photo storage, and siterings.
If you prefer to use CGI scripts hosted on your own site rather than hosted externally then you can do that too without having to create all of your scripts from scratch. There are lots of places on the web that provide free CGI scripts that you can copy and modify for use on your own site. These include Matt's Script Archive and ScriptSearch. You can also find good information on how to create CGI scripts yourself at CGI 101.
To get an easy to remember address for your site requires that you either register a domain name (which costs money) or you can use one of the page redirection facilities. I used ones from Bravenet before getting my own domain.
If you are running a web site for a club or other organisation where you run a subscription list for your members or customers then check out Xara Online - Membership Manager where (for a small fee) you can get a secure online database that can be maintained from anywhere. You can use it to send emails or SMS messages to any member or group, track events and allow members to register their interest, and provide access for members to update their own details and to control their access to members only web pages. This can be seamlessly integrated into your web site and runs on their server so you don't have to install anything special.

Promote

Now that you have built your website, you need to make it known. The most obvious option is to submit your site to search engines but before you do this you might want to consider optimizing your pages to obtain the highest position possible (and therefore to hopefully get the maximum number of visitors to your site). You can either do this yourself or get someone else to do it for you. Some places where you can pay to get it done for you are Li'l Engine and positioned1.

So now you are ready to submit your site to the search engines so that when people search the web they will find you. The best place to start is this search engine and directory list.

You may want to look at link and banner exchange programs where you get your link or banner on someone else's site in exchange forplacing links or banners to other sites on your's. You can do this either by approaching other sites individually and suggesting an exchange of links or by joining a link or banner exchange program such as Free Link Exchange.
Note that you need to be careful if doing this as placing the links pages provided by some exchange programs on your site may actually reduce your chances of getting a good position in search engines and in some cases may stop your site being listed at all.

Still another way to get visitors to your site is to join a ring of similar sites. Three of the main places to look for suitable rings to join are Bravenet SiteRing Central, WebRing, and RingSurf.

There are many other ways to promote your site. Anything that lets other people know that your site exists is useful as long as the advertising is only directed at people who have asked to receive it. One free way to advertise your site is to join MegaResponse and then advertise that service. Anyone who joins under you in the service will then be advertising your site as well as their own.

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