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• ISBN13: 9780596520977
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Whether you want to build a personal web site, an e-commerce site, a blog, or a web site for a specific occasion or promotion, this book gives you detailed instructions and clear-headed advice for:

• Everything from planning to launching. From picking and buying a domain name, choosing a Web hosting firm, building your site, and uploading the files to a web server, this book teaches you the nitty-gritty of creating your home on the Web.
• Ready-to-use building blocks. Creating your own web site doesn’t mean you have to build everything from scratch. You’ll learn how to incorporate loads of pre-built and freely available tools like interactive menus, PayPal shopping carts, Google ads, and Google Analytics.
• The modern Web. Today’s best looking sites use powerful tools like Cascading Style Sheets (for sophisticated page layout), JavaScript (for rollover buttons and cascading menus), and video. This book doesn’t treat these topics as fancy frills. From step one, you’ll learn easy ways to create a powerful site with these tools.
• Blogs. Learn the basics behind the Web’s most popular form of self-expression. And take a step-by-step tour through Blogger, the Google-run blogging service that will have you blogging before you close this book.

This isn’t just another dry, uninspired book on how to create a web site. Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual is a witty and intelligent guide you need to make your ideas and vision a web reality. Get everything you need to plan and launch a web site, including detailed instructions and clear-headed advice on ready-to-use building blocks, powerful tools like CSS and JavaScript, and Google’s Blogger. The thoroughly revised, completely updated new edition of Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual explains how to get your site up and running quickly and correctly. 

5 Tips for Budding Web Site Creators
By Matthew MacDonald

These days, aspiring Web site creators like you pick up a lot of Web-design theory before you start working on your pages. But as deadlines loom and the value of “do it right” falls victim to the imperative to “do it right now,” even the best of us sometimes toss good practice out the window. That’s perfectly understandable and no cause for panic—after all, if Web weavers waited until their pages were perfect before uploading them, the Internet would be a very lonely place indeed. However, sometimes innocent-seeming shortcuts can cause headaches later on. Here are a few pieces of Web advice that site creators ignore at their own risk:

1. Always include a doctype. Web browsers can translate two languages into Web pages: old-school HTML and today’s XHTML. You have to tell the browser which language (called markup) you use, and you do that with a document type definition, better known as a doctype. Doctype is arcane code that looks like this:< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”> If you forget to include a doctype, your pages will appear annoyingly inconsistent. That’s because some browsers, including Internet Explorer, switch into a backward-compatibility state known as quirks mode when they encounter unidentified markup; in essence, they attempt to act like an outdated browser from the 1990s. Common problems that result include text that appears at different sizes in different browsers and layouts that wind up in different configurations depending on your browser.

2. Keep formatting instructions out of your markup. In a rush, it’s easy to get lazy and apply inline styles (or even worse, formatting tags like < font > ) to a page’s XHTML or HTML. But it’s rare for a web site creator to use a particular format just once. Most often, you’ll use a design–say for a column, heading, or note box–elsewhere on the same page or on another of your site pages. To ensure consistency across your site and to make it easier to fine-tune the look and feel of your pages, move all your formatting instructions to a central location: an external style sheet. That way, when a browser processes a page, it grabs this central set of instructions and applies them to the page (see the illustration for the sequence of events).

4. Think twice before you adopt copy-and-paste design. Typically, Web sites use the same page design across all their pages. For example, noodle around Amazon and you’ll always see a menu header at the top of the page and a sidebar on the left. There’s a very special circle in Dante’s Inferno reserved for Web developers who try to achieve consistent design by copying and pasting their XHTML from one page to another. It’s almost impossible to manage or modify this mess across all your pages without making a mistake, even if you have a small Web site. If you need a repeating page design, pick a suitable solution from the available options, each of which comes with its own caveat. Your can use server-side includes (which require Web host support), page templates (provided you have a Web design tool like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web), frames (which can exhibit quirks), or a Web development platform (if you’re willing to take a crash course in programming).

5. Keep an eye on your visitors. Is anyone here? There’s no point in having a Web site if you’re not willing to pay attention to what content draws and keeps visitors and what falls flat on its face. Remarkably, the best way to do that is with a free yet industrial-strength service called Google Analytics. You simply copy a small bit of tracking code to each of your pages and within hours you’ll be able to answer questions like “Where do my visitors live?”, “How long is a typical visit?”, and “What pages are their favorites?”

Visitors are not going to visit your website again if it is unaccessible most of the time. If your website’s storage capacity is very small, then your visitors cannot interact much with it. If your website has low bandwidth and takes even a minute to load, this wait time will pissed off the visitor and is an invitation to click the ‘x’ close or cancel button. A high bandwidth means faster access time and a more enjoyable interaction with your website.

Web users nowadays expect a lot from websites. They want animation. They want high-quality graphics and sound. The list goes on and on and this means you have to have a huge storage space to cater to these user’s fancy. You can continue to upload more and more beautiful images and sounds for the whole world to see and this will invite more and more visitors.

A web hosting service that offers the software services like audio, video streaming, ColdFusion and Flash animations as part of the package instead of as an additional component to pay for, is an enticing offer that you should not let passed by. The features of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) can make ecommerce secure as it will encrypt communication. If this service is available, you can purchase a certificate from the web hosting company. And by displaying this security banner in your website will makes your it professional and secure.

Acquiring a catchy domain name is a good technique to get the attention of your website and your business. But it is difficult nowadays to come up with an original domain name of our choosing since most nice-sounding domain names are already registered in the records in domain registrars. But with a bit of creativity, you can still come up with a really nice domain name.

Choosing a web hosting provider requires research on your part. There are reviews of each web hosting company, and based on your budget you can find a match that will publish you website for the world to see.

Website complexity – Discuss this with your software developer. You may also want to delegate the task of graphics design to an artist. Furthermore, you may have a separate database administrator as well. Discuss together the technical issues involved as a team to come up with a design that both looks good and is functional. In this way, you will understand the technical requirements to best guide you in your choice of a web hosting company.

If external adds cluttering in your web page doesn’t bother you, then there are free web hosting services for this kinds of setup. For best effect, choose the one whose external ads are closely related to the content of your website. In this way, the unexpected banners may look like as if part of your webpage’s content. This can surprisingly improve your website’s hit counts.

There are compromises with free web hosting services though. It is slower than the paid ones. There is also lesser storage space. Nevertheless, some free web hosting services can also have some surprising goodies like a free email account and others.

If you want more control, then you have to go for the paid web hosting services. You can increase your storage space allocation as well as your bandwidth based on how much you pay. You can avail other useful services like many email accounts.

There is a variety of operating system platforms in businesses today. Your company may prefer an Apple, Windows, or a Linux. Make sure that your web hosting provider has the type of platform that you need.

Web hosting is basically about two basic elements: storage space and speed bandwidth. You simply cannot get the best of these features without paying for it. But don’t pay much on features that you do not use. Find the right balance and get the offering that closely match your requirements.

There are other disadvantages of free web hosting such as lack of service to your customer, enormous problem on the lack of technical knowledge of web hosting. Limited disk storage, very little bandwidth, limited email accounts, limited space for your own ads, and less features being offered by the free host and non guaranteed uptime are yet another few reasons why affordable web hosting is preferable than the free ones. And business is of no good if downtime is much longer and frequent.

Fortunately, affordable hosting services can be availed instead of free web hosting services. Its monthly costs are $10 – $50. The features that you would want would be the basis for the price. No matter how much the cost might be, verify the guarantee and refund policies stating money back without question of the hosting service acquired.

“Unlimited bandwidth” is sometimes offered by affordable hosting services. However, unlimited “bandwidth” is never true. This is because web hosts change more when a specific limit is reached. So this is the term you need to be aware of. The support services to the customer are the important things to consider in choosing affordable web hosting. Conduct a thorough research on the website of the web hosting company. Know their length of time in this operation and if they offer the services that will suit your need.

Affordable web hosting is often based on Linux because it is cheaper than Windows and open source development tools are offered such as PHP, MySQL and Telnet service. These languages and databases which are Linux based can be installed for free that’s why .often usable in affordable web hosting companies. Software such as ASP, SQL Server, Cold Fusion, and Access which are Windows proprietary can add additional expense. Since Windows based software is proprietary, it is difficult to find an affordable web hosting using those since purchasing those components by the hosting company is expensive. So it is best to choose a Linux based web hosting services.

Before choosing and making a commitment to an affordable web hosting company, make sure to verify their background and conduct a thorough research on their whereabouts.

One can opt to avail of a paid web hosting that provides the most granularities of choices in terms of software and configurations, hardware compute power, security and reliability. There is no optimized one-size fits-all solution here, and the solution that claims to be such is most probably an overkill of what is actually needed. Depending on the business’ technical specification, web hosting would cost at around $10 to $5,000 at a monthly cost. And ways of payment could vary according to business agreement of both web hosting provider and the client.

Small-scale to medium sized consumers can also prefer shared web services due to its minimum cost. Aside from a minimal monthly charge, individuals and businesses sometimes choose this type of hosting for it requires less technical know-how and provide basic services that they need. Moreover, shared web servers are convenient to use and serves similar purpose. Mostly of the paid web hosting providers offers money back guarantees without questions asked, whenever their services does not conform to the agreed conditions. Also they provide assurance of the highest percentage of uptime. In instances of their service failure such as downtime, they provide compensated reimbursement to their clients.

For those people whose technical know-how on web hosting is at an entry-level, it is best to first experience running their websites in a free web hosting than to avail directly on web hosting that has a monthly cost. Or if the situation suggests that a temporary host and storage is basically needed, then a free web hosting is strongly advisable. However in this venture, limitations are all at hand. The common limitations amongst all the free web hosting services are limited disk storage, minimal bandwidth, non guaranteed uptime, prohibited customization of your web pages, bundle of banner ads that should be posted in your site and zero customer support.

Web hosting could be simpler or far too complex process that depends on the functionality of the website that should provide a partial insight on how to best come up with the optimized choice in terms of whether a paid or free web hosting should fit the personal or business requirements and conditions.