Creating a first website

The creation of a site, if it is clearly planned and operated according to following steps, while starting on good bases will be likely to meet success with Net surfers.

1) Defining the type of site

Principal kinds of Web sites:

• Portal of a product or a company.
• Site of information based on a topic (a technology, a branch of industry).
• Educational site, containing tutorials or curses.
• Dedicated to a software.
• E-trade.
• Forum.
• Blog.
• Wiki.
• Digg-like.
• Sharing something: video, songs, etc.

The type of site will determine the tools to be used, in particular if you intend to use a content manager to facilitate creation. Note that a forum or a directory can accompany a portal site, and that is even preferable.

2) The topic of the site and its public

For an optimal indexing by search engines and a better ranking in results, a site should be devoted to a single topic, well delimited. The first stage is thus the exact definition of to what the site will be devoted.
The public for which the site will be intended must also be well defined, before the creating.

In one site, multiple topics are not desirable at least at first. Conversely it is not desirable to create multiple sites on the same theme, a single bigger site is preferred.

3) Choosing a name

The name of the site can be allotted to a sub-domain which is a sub-repertory on the server, or a domain name like www.scriptol.com. Choose a name which has a value if possible (short, significant, often requested keyword).
Even if you have a free hosting with a sub-domain, it is preferable to deposit a domain name and to make it point on your sub-domain (for example, http://www.scriptol.com would be redirected on http://scriptet.sourceforge.net). However the benefit remains limited.

4) Choosing a host

The host preferably should support PHP 5 to run modern scripts. Hosting may have a CGI-BIN directory or not, variable bandwich, different statistical system, choose the one according to your needs. A dedicated server offer more freedom if you can manage a server.

5) Creating contents and uploading it on line

To make a site, it is enough to upload a single page in the space provided by the server, this page being named index.html.
Knowing the HTML syntax is not essential, you can publish the page on a text processing like Word or Open Office and save it in the HTML format.
If you envisage an important volume of pages or want avoid defining page-setting, you can use a content manager which will propose a preset page-setting and will deal with the organization of the site.

Making a blog

It can be managed by a specialized website and you have just to type your text.
One can also have his own host and a tool for creation of pages. In this case one will use a contents manager, the most used being Wordpress and DotClear.

Ask you about the quality

Ask yourself a series of questions to ensure that the site is not considered of poor quality by search engines such as by readers.

• The content is it original? (A search on the title and subtitle may be useful).
  Your site must be different, to add something more to what is already on the Web.
• Do users trust you when they read your page?
  It depends on your references, but also details that you will bring.
• Do you give your visitors what they want?
  It may be helpful to submit the site to others for advice.
• Do visitors want to read more page, to set bookmark, click the Like or +1 button?
  It depends as much on the interest of the content and presentation, which justifies the next section.

6) Creating a more attractive site

To go beyond the textual site, and to offer to visitors fancy web pages, a specialized HTML editor becomes essential, accompanied by tools to generate logos and images.
The use of style sheets will be also necessary for a really serious site. A ready to use model is proposed on this site.

7) Optimization for search engines and promotion

Referencing consists in making your site visible on the Net, which would be completely ignored of the public without that.
The first stage is the inscription on each principal search engine. Then, once the website has a sufficient content, to the Dmoz.org directory and some bookmark sites

At first the pages must be prepared for the engines.

Meta-tags

These are tags whose contents are not displayed to visitors but which is taken into account by search engines. There is a quantity of them but only two are really important.

The <title> tag

It contains the title of the page. It is recommended by the HTML specification. This title must absolutely be different for each page. It should not be a list of keywords but a descriptive sentence. It should not start by the name of the site on each page.
Note that if the <title> tag is omitted, Google will use the first title marked out by <h1> </h1> or if not, H2, h3, etc.
However other software can need the <title> tag.

The robot tag

Its format is as follows: <meta name= "robots" content="" > and it is placed in the <head> section too. It is intended for robots of search engines.
The contents are one to three words separated by commas:

• Index, noindex: to index or not the page.
• follow, nofollow: to take into account the links in the page, or not.
• file, noarchive: to put out the page in cache on Google's server (and other search engines) or not.
• all= index, follow, archive.
• none= noindex, nofollow, noarchive.
• noodp: the ODP description is ignored. For site that are indexed in the Dmoz directory.
  

Automatic generation of metas

The SpiderSEO software is a tool to assist the webmaster in preparing webpages to referencing by creating meta tags automatically.

Site map

The sitemap is recommended by Google to help its robots in indexing. However, the majority of the reports which were submitted to me are negative, the creation and the upload of a map, even in the standard XML format of sitemaps.org, does not have result on indexing of the pages and results of search engines in most case. Sitemap is really useful when for some reason, all pages of the site are not indexed. If you wish create a sitemap, try a free software, Simple Map.

RSS Feed

Building an RSS feed on your site to publicize the latest articles or selected pages is not difficult if you install the Free Online ARA RSS editor. It is a tool for promoting effective as explained in an article on the same site.

8) Enter the Web 2.0 with Javascript, PHP, ASP, Ajax, CSS

The definition of Web 2.0 explains what is this concept.
That consists of the use of the techniques of dynamic site described above, but also of the use of specialized libraries provided in particular by search engines, which are combined to create new services (mashup).
Sites exist that are based entirely on a Web service, using new technologies of Web 2.0, and they are the object of transactions in million or billion dollars.

Javascript

Scripting language which is embedded in the HTML code of Web pages. It makes it possible to modify its contents, for example to process forms. You may learn how to use Javascript with interactive examples and demos.

PHP or ASP

PHP scripts are placed in a HTML page, but are executed on the server before the page is sent to browsers. A new page may be build according to instructions of scripts.
ASP is an alternative to PHP. It runs only on a Windows server.

Ajax

It is the combination of Javascript, DOM, CSS and a server-side language like PHP or ASP. Using of specialized libraries (frameworks) facilitate the task by providing commonly used functions. Start with this popular Ajax Tutorial.

CSS

Cascading style sheet, for the presentation of the page: defined once, used anywhere.
This introduction provides a demo of CSS template. Some funny effect using CSS are also provide on the site.

9) Maintenance of your site

How much links towards your site for search engines? Once referencing achieved, after one month deadline, you will want to know the result. An estimate may be got from Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools.
From time to time, once a month preferably, one must check if the links on external sites are always valid. That can be done automatically with the command link checker provided by this site.
If your site is created under Windows, to see how it look under another operating system may be useful. Using a Linux Live CD is the best way to see the site under another operating system at no cost.

Software and resources

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