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Before you can
create a website there are some things you must decide. Like what style
you want to use and what do you want in it.
Some examples which may be
combined:
---- Personal: you and who you are.
----
Hobbies: things you like to do.
----
Graphics: collection of graphics you have made or
gathered to share.
---- Informational: things you
desire others to know.
---- Business: things you want
to sell whether it is a product or service.
What you must have to
begin your site.
---- The idea of the site you want.
----
The
web and FTP program you want to use.
---- The graphics programs you
will use.
---- The word processor you may need.
----
The
text you will use or at least a good idea of what you want to
say.
---- The graphics you made or may
download.
---- The sounds you may want to use.
(I am not into sounds so I can't recommend which would be best or
free.)
---- A free host site to host your website.
A
graphic intensive site sometimes loads more slowly than an all text
site. For this reason you need to remember when you are making the
graphics or choosing them to be sure to optimize them. I forgot that step
when creating this site and had to go back and optimize them all. In doing
this some needed to change formats to obtain the best size this caused the
site not to work so I then had to go back in and fix it. I wish I had
remembered. ;-)) One of the drawbacks of using
the non-HTML, WYSIWYG type web builders, is the code used can become
bloated, slowing down the loading. However I have done several of these
sites and have found that you can use quite a lot of optimized graphics
and still have it load fast enough with WYSIWYG editors. The problem with
a slow site is people won't wait and won't want to return no matter how
good the site is. With this site I am trying to show some of the things
that can be done for free and still load fast enough to maintain interest.
I won't be going into using frames because they can be frustrating to the
surfers that come to your site. Further since I can't cover all types of
site here I wont try, but instead I will just talk about the kind of site
this is. However I may mention a couple hints or guides where possible
about others.
Once you know what kind of site you will design and
what information it will contain, you should type out the text you will
use. I typed this text right into this page as a text feature of Trellian
WebPage including the spell checking. But other programs have built in
text editors, like in WebDwarf v2, another free web program I have
used by IMS Virtual Mechanics. You could use a word processor
and then cut and paste the text. However you should be aware you will
probably lose the special formatting that the word processor creates, as
this formatting is usually not compatible with web pages. I have had
several different brands of word processors, and some were quite
expensive, but I may have settled on an office suite that is quite similar
to MS Office 2000, which I also have, but by choice I use OpenOffice.org
1.1. It is free even the source code is free. It is a complete office
suite, with Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress
(presentation manager), Draw (an advance illustrator) and Database
User Tools. As I am doing all this with free stuff I will be telling about
the programs I use as I go along and think of them. You will find links to
them on my Links and Programs pages. Which brings me to the point
that some sites are one very long page and some are several shorter pages.
You will see here that I use both depending on how much I have for that
particular page and what the individual page is for. Some people have a
definite preference and when you pay to have a site made it is usually
cheaper to have a longer page as there are often less links to deal with
from a webmaster's perspective. Before you can start building your site
you must gather, or make the basic graphics of the site. Be sure to
optimize them. Of course even before that you must gather the
programs you will use. Got your web idea??? Then continue to the
Programs page and see what you need.
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