Advice wanted on starting a Website

I would suggest some things:

Register a domain name eg middleeastaircraft.com. Don’t use a so called subdomain such as bt/middleeastaircraft.com since if you want to change the company that connects your computer to the internet (your Internet Service Provider), your web address will change, too. Also you will lose your email address eg [email]keith@bt.com[/email].

What you see on a website is broken down into “pages”. These are computer files containing words and pictures with instructions as to how they should be laid out on the screen. These pages can be prepared and viewed on your own PC, but for others to see them using the internet they need to copied onto a computer known as an internet server. Storing your files on such as server is known as hosting. There are many hosting companies.

Hosting companies will provide a certain limited amount of disc space for storing your web page files. Additionally they will provide a certain limited amount of data transfer – every time someone looks at your website data needs to be transferred from the internet server to their PC.

Music and video can also be stored in a webpage. These take up a lot of space on the internet server disc and involve large amounts of data transfer from the internet server to the PC of anyone listening to music or watching video.

Broadly speaking, the amount of resources used in transferring data from the internet server to all the PC’s of people looking at your webpages is known as the amount of bandwidth used.

“Professional” web site design tools such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver will certainly take scores or hundreds of hours to learn. I don’t know anything about low cost tools that will let you build your own website but I suspect that they will generally be geared to producing simple websites.

Spitfire9 Many thanks for putting it in a straightforward manner. I am not going to do anything with Video or music, I want to keep it very simple to start with.The domain name advice is useful as well as I want it to stand out.

If you let us know who your service provider is then you could have some very specific information about what you already have available to you. Otherwise all you will get is generic information – a bit like asking which car you should buy next. Unless you have a need to spend money I would suggest this might be a sensible way to get advice specific to your self and potentially cheaper than buying a program such as Dreamweaver or Photoshop!.

Chris – I have not got as far as the service provider yet. Basically I have the raw material and I want to next give a bit of thought as to how I am going to organise the site – by time periods or locations/areas or both. From what I am starting to see about Dreamweaver it sounds very good but beyond my capablilities at the moment. I have at least moved on quite a bit from the advice given to me a couple of weeks ago that I needed a “host” and that was it??:confused:

I would like to start a historical aviation website relating to the Middle East but I have absolutely no idea how to go about it. Could someone tell me what is involved – particularly how the site is set up and who do you have to contact to set it up? Also roughly how much does it cost? I have seen one or two non aviation websites where the people who run them are complaining about the cost of it. Any advice /help would be gratefully appreciated
Thanks
Keith

I would suggest some things:

Register a domain name eg middleeastaircraft.com. Don’t use a so called subdomain such as bt/middleeastaircraft.com since if you want to change the company that connects your computer to the internet (your Internet Service Provider), your web address will change, too. Also you will lose your email address eg [email]keith@bt.com[/email].

What you see on a website is broken down into “pages”. These are computer files containing words and pictures with instructions as to how they should be laid out on the screen. These pages can be prepared and viewed on your own PC, but for others to see them using the internet they need to copied onto a computer known as an internet server. Storing your files on such as server is known as hosting. There are many hosting companies.

Hosting companies will provide a certain limited amount of disc space for storing your web page files. Additionally they will provide a certain limited amount of data transfer – every time someone looks at your website data needs to be transferred from the internet server to their PC.

Music and video can also be stored in a webpage. These take up a lot of space on the internet server disc and involve large amounts of data transfer from the internet server to the PC of anyone listening to music or watching video.

Broadly speaking, the amount of resources used in transferring data from the internet server to all the PC’s of people looking at your webpages is known as the amount of bandwidth used.

“Professional” web site design tools such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver will certainly take scores or hundreds of hours to learn. I don’t know anything about low cost tools that will let you build your own website but I suspect that they will generally be geared to producing simple websites.

This is exactly the sort of guidance I was after. Very helpful indeed. Everyone I have asked so far, who “knows” about computers, really don’t know it turns out.
Many thanks to everyone who replied.
Keith
(Old Git)

zebedee seems to know what hes talking about:):) im slightly above the man in the pub

theres a whole world of hosting places to use Fasthosts is a reasonable one to use. But for a beginer i would start with geocities and work my way up from there.

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/

As a sometime professional web designer and lecturer there’s a couple of points id like to address…

Free Hosting is all very well, but you wont get the same level of support you will with a dedicated host and package. £80 a year is about right for space and the url for a site that gets a medium level of traffic.

If you want to go for a professional web designer be careful, they verge from the self taught bloke in the pub, to people who manage a large portfolio of sites for clients and are usually rushed of there feet. The trick is to find the guy/girl who’s in the middle, in other words they know what there doing, but doesn’t have so much work they wont look after you. One thing you need to be very wary of is web designer running of with your url or registering it in there name..1

QldSpitty’s idea about blogs is a great one, im in the process of using blogging software with a number of clients who want to be able to update content them selves, but havn’t the time to learn web design. They offer quite a high degree of customisation way and are an easy to get a professional looking site with a sophisticated structure. You can either go with a blogging site such as blogger, where the back-end is set up for you, or software such as WordPress which you configure yourself. Be warned though if you go that route you will loose some hair, and need a host that can support MySQL and PHP.

If you want to do it yourself I cant recommend Dreamweaver highly enough, however for a beginner it might be a tad overwhelming, particularly from the site management point of view. Theres no such thing really as a dreamweaver site, its just a piece of software that allows you assemble the elements of the page and then it writes the HTML code for you. Photoshop is the industry standard for image manipulation,Photoshop Elements is allot cheaper and will do all you need for a website, however there is an open source alternative called the GIMP which offers allot of the same functionality for free.

You may find these URL’s useful:

Dreamweaver
Photoshop
The Gimp
Photoshop Elements

Hope that helps..!

Zeb

With updates a blog is a great way to go..

My St Mawgan website was a freebie, and had eight pages plus you could have upto five sites, so plenty adequete for the beginner. It came free with my Orange ISP and was very easy to use and understand – especially with layout, text and adding pics. Editing and updating was a sinch.

However Orange has now changed its system, so I have now picked Freewebs for my newsite (wich I am still putting together), and that is available to any net user for free.
I’ve heard you have to watch out for time limits (ie some will only run for 2 yrs before they persuade you to go paysite), but I aven’t encountered this personally.

My intention is to use free hosting sites for a little while, just to get the hang of building and arranging the site and to see how popular it will be (they have vistor counters), the St Mawgan site was far more popular than I imagined so will eventually go to a proper pay host and pay for a domain name (ie subjet.com or .co.uk.).

Im thinking of going down the same line as last lightning by using dreamweaver.
Last Lightning can you explain more about hosting and costs of a dreamweaver site?

I would also suggest starting with a free hosting solution, as people above me have mentioned.

Once you generate some interest (people start visiting), then you can move it to dedicated hosting (by that time you should know enough to choose a host).

SeaMonkey is a free HTML editor based on WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), maybe start by playing around with it, to get the feeling for web design.

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Google gives you the opportunity to design and run your own website without any costs and it’s so easy to do yourself that no web design experience is needed. You’ll need to register a Gmail address, but that’s also free.

Just go to http://pages.google.com and you’ll be design your page in no time at all; it’s just like working in a page-layout application.

Have a quick look at mine. I had it up and running in less than an evening, and can add or change anything at any time at all:

http://rjcaviationart.googlepages.com/home

when you’ve got past all that lot try dreamweaver. Fab software lets you design your site from scratch in either design or code view. It is a bit complicated to use but once you get the hang of it you wont use anything else. If you get fireworks intergrated into it its even better. Fireworks is a bit like photoshop but easier to use.

The whole package took me about two years to learn but well worth it:)

http://www.skegnesspubs.co.uk/index.htm is one that was made earlier

Do a search on Mr Site 🙂 Its a simple website set-up programme, costs around £30 and gets you registered and up and running in a few hours.

Setup your own website

I taught myself to design and launch a website. You need to pay a hosting company, I use Penguin Internet Ltd. as they do not need your credit card details on their server, which most others do. Their package costs about £45 for a year, and you may need to pay a domain registration fee, around £5 for two years.
To design, edit and publish your site you will need CuteFTP, costing £24, if you go with Penguin. However there are free programs available, I have used Nvu quite a lot.
If you want to see my site look at www.burnham-on-crouchu3a.co.uk
I only update it when I feel like it. You can have an email facility in the package, and set your current email program to receive emails sent to your site.
Basically you can spend as much or as little as you want.
Your ISP may well provide you with webspace within your account, then you could do your own site for next to nothing.
Hope this helps.
Regards from
Geoff.Charge

I would like to start a historical aviation website relating to the Middle East but I have absolutely no idea how to go about it. Could someone tell me what is involved – particularly how the site is set up and who do you have to contact to set it up? Also roughly how much does it cost? I have seen one or two non aviation websites where the people who run them are complaining about the cost of it. Any advice /help would be gratefully appreciated
Thanks
Keith

I have a family history website which I “designed” and a firm produced it for me and will do all updates and hosts it for me. All I do is check how many people look at it, receive contact emails and upload new files every 3 months or so. Cost was about £400 and £80 pa to host but I suppose it will depend on what you want. Have a look at robertwhitton.eu for the pages and the Firm was Lancaster Hunt. contact:-

[email]jane.hunt@lancasterhunt.co.uk[/email],

I provided all content and agreed general layout. I was provided with a rough draft that was refined and then agreed on. As Family History has large gedcom files to update things it is a specific type but I am sure they can give you precise estimates