What Do I Need To Make My Own Website?

For beginners, the easiest place to start is with commercial web design software, the most popular of which is Dreamweaver. This software allows you to easily layout your web site and insert text, images and other content.

There are templates and instructions to help you build your first web site pages, and there are also many advanced features to get to grips with as your skills grow.

To really understand what goes into creating your pages and get total control over them, you will need to learn a programming language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). This is a set of instructions to your web browser to tell it what text and graphics content to display on your pages.

Although you can use software like Dreamweaver to code HTML, it is possible to create HTML web pages using a text editor such as Notepad++.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

HTML is a relatively easy programming language to learn as it uses many simple and obvious words as instructions. For example, the following is a line of HTML code:

<font face="Arial" size="2" color="blue">This is blue Arial text in size 2</font>

This line displays some text which is in the Arial font at size 2 and in the colour blue.

Despite its relative simplicity, there is a lot to learn about HTML and all the different instructions that are available. Fortunately, there are many books and web sites that offer tutorials for beginners to HTML and web design.

XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) is a newer version of HTML that is cleaner, stricter and more future-proof. Modern web site design tends to use XHTML for content along with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for layout.

One of the best resources for learning web programming languages such as HTML or XHTML is www.w3schools.com

One thing many web coders find useful is to examine the code that makes up other people's web sites. You can do this by going to a site in your browser and on the menu, click View (or Page in Internet Explorer 7) and then click Source.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

A good practice when creating web sites is to separate content and layout, so that you have a HTML or XHTML file for your page content (such as text), and a separate file called a 'Style Sheet' to handle the visual layout of your page.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) files contain instructions telling the browser how to display and arrange specific elements of the content. This is an example of CSS code:

p {
color: blue;
font-family: Arial;
text-align: left;
}

The above piece of code tells the browser that all paragraphs ('p') of text should be coloured blue and use the Arial font. It also tells the browser that paragraphed text should be aligned to the left of the page.

Using CSS can help reduce the amount of code you need to write. Using the example above, you only have to specify settings for paragraphs once in the CSS file and it will affect every paragraph in the HTML page. Without a Style Sheet you would have to use HTML code to tell each individual paragraph to be blue, Arial, aligned left etc.

To learn how to use CSS code, read the tutorials at www.w3schools.com

Why Does My Site Look Different on Different PCs?

There are several reasons why web pages can look different on different PCs. One factor is screen display settings, such as screen resolutions and colours, which can vary on different monitors and LCD screens.

Many web sites use 'fixed-width' designs so that no matter what a particular PC's display settings are, the web pages will always be a certain width, for example 800 pixels.

Other sites use 'liquid layouts', specifying percentages so that an overall width of 100% will stretch the page to fit the whole of the browser window. However, images and certain other parts of the content will not stretch, so sometimes this can lead to large gaps in the page design, especially on larger screens.

Different web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox use different ways of displaying the same web page code. Mobiles and hand-held devices will also give a very different version of web pages. And some browsers only read text and do not display graphics or images at all.

In order to combat this problem, a set of 'Web Standards' was devised to try and make web sites look and act the same (or at least degrade gracefully) whatever the method of viewing them. To check that your web page code complies with Web Standards you can use the Validator tools at http://validator.w3.org

Domain Names And Web Space

Your web site will need a Domain Name, also known as a 'web address' or 'URL'. There are many places on the Internet where you can buy one for your site.

Once you have decided on a suitable address to match your web site subject, such as www.mysitename.com, you will need to have that name registered to you.

There are various domain registration companies you can find on the Internet. You pay a fee after which the domain name is registered to you for a certain period of time.

Since many domain names have already been taken, you may not always be able to have your first choice name so you may have to think up some variation. Try to keep it short and unique so people will easily remember it.

You will also need some Web Space to store the files that make up your site. The web space is not on your computer; you need to buy it from a company that offers Web Hosting such as 1 & 1 Internet.

What you have to do is transfer or 'upload' your pages to a specific storage area you have been allocated on a 'server' owned by your web host. This is a special computer that is always online, so that no matter where in the world your visitors are or what time of day it is, they can access your web site pages.

Your web host should give more information on their web site and provide tools for uploading your pages. There are also useful programs available to download on the Web that can make the process easier such as FileZilla.

Getting Listed With Search Engines

If you want people to visit your site, they need to be able to find it using a search engine. You need to choose a good domain name, use the right keywords on your pages, and put a clear title on each page reflecting its particular subject. There are many other methods you can use to try to improve your 'search engine ranking' (how near the top of search results pages your site appears).

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is a big topic and one that is especially important to business web sites. There are many web sites and programs that attempt to boost search rankings artificially. For information about the right ways to increase your ranking and site 'traffic' (visitors), read the Google webmaster guidelines.

How Can I Find Out How Many People Have Visited My Site?

Most web hosts will provide you with detailed statistics of not only the number of visitors to your site, but also information such as when they visited, which pages they viewed, how they arrived at your site and more.

Typically you will need to log in to your account page on your host's web site and you will see options to display your statistics.

Otherwise you can try Google's Analytics service.

Site Ranking Tools

As your web site grows, you will want to judge its popularity in comparison to other web sites. There are various ranking systems available, two of the most well-known are Google PageRank and Alexa Rank.

Google PageRank analyzes links to web pages from other web sites and gives the page a ranking of 0 - 10. A high PageRank shows how popular the site is in the eyes of Google. There is more information about the system Google uses on the PageRank Wikipedia.

Alexa Rank uses statistics gathered from users who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. This enables information to be gathered about a web site's traffic and where visitors are coming from, however the accuracy of the ranking system has sometimes been criticized as it can lead to misleading results.

www.siteometrics.com offers a quick way of viewing your Google PageRank, link popularity, and Alexa Rank.

Some web site owners spend much of their time trying to improve their site's search engine placement and site rankings through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques. Some even try to trick search engines or artificially boost their site rankings, but nowadays the systems are so sophisticated that most of these tricks will not work.

However, there are plenty of ways to improve your site's rankings without cheating. Help search engines index your site by using meta tags and by creating a sitemap. Link to other web sites (preferably on a similar topic) and encourage them to link to you. Keep your site up-to-date and do articles on the latest products, news or events. There are also many commercial advertising schemes you can use to promote your site.

But the best way to improve your web site's popularity is to work on creating a site with lots of good content that people will want to visit naturally.