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In the dark about getting a website?...or "What the heck is a website anyway?" |
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Lots of people and companies know they need a web site to stay competitive in business these days. So once you know you need one, how do you get one?
First, think of the internet as a foreign country your going to visit. There’s the language problem. The internet has been developing for over 30 years, and has grown it’s own language; you’ll need a bit of terminology to navigate. See the glossary at the end if you run into terms your not familiar with. Secondly, picture the internet as a billboard by a highway; you have traffic, and you have an opportunity to get your message across. What message is it you want to convey? That’s the hardest part of planning a web site; deciding what information to include, and how to organize it. Next, imagine your web site as something dynamic. My previous two analogies were static, but a web site is not. If you imagine a web site as a billboard, then you need to re-paper your imaginary billboard regularly. If you imagine your web site as a dialogue, you are getting a clearer picture. All these diverse analogies and more fit the internet; it’s an exciting place. Your web site can be an exciting corner of it. No other advertising or networking tool can offer you more freedom for your dollar. The more competitive your business, the more important it becomes to set yourself apart from the competition. Whatever it is that makes you, your business or service unique and valuable, the internet give you the flexibility to define it. O.K. you now know you want a web site, and you're thinking about what you want it to say. You are probably writing text content and thinking about images: these are the usual tools we resort to when we have something to say. Now you can start thinking about what else you want your web site to do. Remember, it’s more than a billboard or advertisement. Do you want to communicate with clients, customers, family or friends? Do you have a product or service to market? Are you looking for feedback on an issue or idea? Consider your expectations for your web site, and try and define them as clearly as possible. Now the process of developing your web site really gets under way. If I were designing your web page, we would discuss your expectations and ideas. We will look at your text and graphics and talk about how information, ideas and images should be arranged, and how it should look. We might talk about how administrative aspects of your business could be streamlined with a website, or how it could keep your family in touch around the world. Next I go away and develop a draft version of your web site! There are three steps in that process: basically, input, manipulation and output. Input usually means scanning images (unless they are already digital files) and typing text. Manipulation is more like an act of translation; coding the images and text into language that computers can understand. Output in this case means digital files; they can be seen on a monitor. So once input, manipulation and output have taken place, you can look over your web site, we can make edits and changes, then it can go ‘on-line’. The bunch of files that make up your web site have to have a home; to go on-line, they need to rent accommodations somewhere. They don’t rent an apartment, they are transferred to a server. Their ‘Landlord’ is an ‘Internet Service Provider’. How much server space they need depends on how big they are; text files are just tiny mites, but image files can grow huge, and web sites need some room to grow and develop too. Server space, like most rental accommodations, has an address. Your web site might want it’s own special address (called "domain name") or it might be content to have an address that more resembles general delivery or a postal box. Both space requirements and addressing requirements will affect the costs for server space. But isn’t it dynamic? Now that your web site is on-line and getting visitors, you will want to keep it fresh and current so people will visit often. Think about how you can keep your web visitors interested and coming back, then we can begin the on going maintenance of your site. Depending on your site, you may want to consider monthly maintenance, or quarterly maintenance. There are lots of fun ways to keep your site interesting; don’t let the word maintenance put you off; this part is fun! I hope this overview has given you a picture of the process. Please contact me if I can answer any questions or help you with your web page.
Andrea's E-mail address: andreag@inforamp.net
Glossary... a casual, non-technical glossaryB - C - D - F - H - I - L - O - S - T - WFTP - means "file transfer protocol" and it’s a program that sends files over the internet - it’s like a bus for files - that’s how they get to the server they live on. Internet - definitions of this take up entire books; basically, a network of interlinked computers and servers. It’s over 30 years old, and it reaches around the globe, and connects to a significant and growing portion of the population. Internet Service Provider - the company that owns the server; they rent space for the exclusive residency of digital files. They also do e-mail and other internet functions. Link - an active connection between information; something you click on to get somewhere else. Server - the kind of computer that digital files ‘live’ in when they are on-line. To get server space, you contact an internet service provider. Web Site - a bigger version of a web page - lots of linked files together, living on a server where browsers can view them. Some really big sites live on many servers. If I can answer any questions for you, please see above for ways to contact me!
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