Quick Start Guide
In too much of a hurry to read the tutorials? Then the quick start guide is the place for you. Included in this section:
- Regestering a Domain Name and Web Hosting
- Building the Website
- Uploading the Website
- Validating Web Pages
- Internet Visibility
Domain Name and Hosting
There are many companies online offering domain names and web hosting. The key points to look for when choosing one are price and service. As prices tend to be relatively competitive, the most important factor is service. Is their website clear and easy to navigate? Is the cPanel access you will be using to maintain your domain and hosting easy to use? Is the customer and technical support good? Unfortunately, most of these factors are impossible to know until after you've signed up. For those just starting out with a small site I would recommend a company called 123-reg.co.uk. They do pretty well in all the above fields. Also, you can check if the domain name you require is available below (don't add an extension such as .com as the search will list all possible extensions). If the domain you're after isn't available, keep trying with alternatives. After regestering a domain name, simply buy their hosting starter package (around £2.49 per month).
After signing up and making payment (credit/debit card/paypal), keep a record of any emails they send you as these will contain some important FTP information in the form of:
Building the Website
The easiest way to start is to download a basic website template and then customise it as required. A basic template will include a single HTML file called index.html, a stylesheet called style.css, and some images in a folder named "/images". You can download a template from this website or elsewhere and save the files to you PC's C: drive like something like this:
Then open the HTML file and start adding your content text and links to your images. If you need more webpages, simply copy the index.html file and rename the copies as desired (eg. dogs.html). Be sure to set up your site navigation as required using an unordered list containing anchors. You can also play around with the styling and layout by altering the stysheet file.
Uploading the Website
To upload your files to your web host's server you need to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol). For this you need to download a piece of software called an FTP Client. One of the easiest to use is FileZilla, and even better, it's free. To download it, click on the image on the right and then install it on your PC.
Once installed, click on the Filezilla icon on your desktop (or under Start>Programs). You will then be faced with a screen showing your PC's files on the left and a blank area on the right for the remote server. Click on "File" in the top-left corner, then on "Site Manager" in the pulldown menu that appears as shown on the right (or alternatively click on the site manager icon just below file 
). You will now have a dailogue box like the one below sitting centrally on your screen:
Click on "New Site" and a new site will appear in the list on the left of the box, which you can rename to whatever you wish. With your FTP details at hand, enter these into the fields on the right hand side (Host, User, Password). Once finished click "Ok". The box will then close. Simply re-open it by clicking again on Site Manager, then click "Connect". If you've entered your details correctly, your PC will then connect to the remote server, whose files will be shown on the right hand side of the Filezilla screen. To upload your files simply right click on them and click upload. You will now see them sitting on the right hand portion of the screen as well as the left - the site is now live! Once finished, close Filezilla, open your browser (IE, Mozilla etc) and take a look at your site on the Internet!
Validating Web Pages
It is a good idea to validate your web pages with the World Wide Web Consortium at http://validator.w3.org where you can enter theURL of your website. A DOCTYPE Declaration must be included in all pages. This will highlight any basic errors in your coding.
Internet Visibilty
Most visitors will find a website through an Internet search rather than typing a URL directly into a browser's address bar, and for this to be possible, search engines need to crawl and index websites sitting on the Internet. Although they will eventually crawl and index your site automatically in a few weeks, it can be worth submitting directly to them. Don't ever pay to do this and don't bother with more than the big 3, Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN), and possibly also Ask (Jeeves).
Submitting to Ask (Jeeves) is a little more difficult. First you need to create an XML sitemap file called sitemap.xml, and then enter the following "ping address" into your browser address bar: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml.
Don't submit to Internet link directories, but do submit your site to Dmoz, the original open source directory. It is also worth signing up to these two very useful Google tools:
Google Analytics is a web statistical tool that gives useful feedback data on visitor traffic and habits. It is free, signup is quick, and this fantastic tool allows you to view traffic from an hourly to monthly basis, to see where that traffic came from, what browers were used, what the entry and exit pages were, the bounce rate of your site (whether visitors stayed or not), and it even allows detailed analysis of wherre visitors clicked on your index page - very useful if you are running adverts.
In order to use this tool, Google will give you a snippet of Javascript code to add to each page of your website, usually at the bottom just before the </body> tag, that looks something like this:
Google Webmaster Tools provides detailed reports about how visible your webpages are to Google. Again it is free, signup is quick, and with this great tool you can share information about your site with Google and see their view of your site, diagnose any problems, and even see your link and query traffic. In order to use this tool, Google will ask you to submit an XML sitemap and will give you a snippet of code to to the head section of the index page of your website.
This is the end of the quick start quide. If none of this makes sense then please feel free to work through the other tutorials!
