Lococat's Getting Started

First thing to do with any computer project is to save your work and to save it frequently. Even those who have been working on projects for years forget this rule (do we wonder why this rule might be listed first?), and it is simpler to save than to recreate an hours work.

Before jumping on the computer and building your web pages, you might want to sketch out on paper your ideas. Put the idea behind your page on paper and try to determine if this idea requires just a single page or multiple pages. Will your site be mainly text or heavy on the images? Is your site personal or business (a combo page is extremely difficult to do well), will it be an informative page such as the fan site here, that you want many others to read or just a site for family members, such as this one at Grey SeaTiger ? Both sites are well done, but the difference is the audience you are targeting, and for business sites this incredibly important. Your Mom & Dad will probably forgive you for having Aunt Ida's picture upside down, and a broken link on a fan page is generally tolerated, but neither is acceptable for a business. The web is supposed to make things easier for people and if your clients are frustrated by your site, well there goes a customer. Try to make your site address your audience.

One other thing to consider before you build your page is where your site will be hosted, meaning where it is stored till a viewer requests to see the page. Most local service providers will provide you with storage and Yahoo and many others will provide you with free pages in exchange for advertising space on your page. If you have a business page, you need to consider your space requirements, the bandwidth you might need and the reliability of the host. It means very little to have built a great site, if no one can access it because the host is always down.

OK, you know what you are building and where you are storing it, so the question becomes how do you build it? Use to be all web pages had to be built with raw code (right click and click on view source to see some raw code) and there was no other way to build a site. The Dragon Aerie was and is all done with raw code. If you thought the code looked interesting and want to try coding, go to HTML: An Interactive Tutorial for Beginners [ Dave's HTML Guide ] for hands on learning. There is lot to learn with coding and be sure to give yourself some back up resources on the coding. You can cheat on coding a little, where if you see something nice on a web page (hopefully, nonproprietary), you can copy the source to play with it. Now if you looked at the code and blanched, there is still hope for your web site. There are free web page templates here at Webspawner.com or at ByDezign , where you enter information and images into areas of the template. Yahoo Geocities offers similar features and again other ISPs will offer tools to build your own pages. Then there are the software packages where you put material on screen the way you want it seen and the computer translates it into code. Whether you create the code or use software for the code, don't forgot if you created it on your pc, that you have to upload it to the host in order for it to be displayed.

Test your site by checking the load times of the pages, if you have a page with a lot of graphics you might want to tell people in text at the top of the page or next to the link bringing them to the page. Also, check your links out and make sure they function properly. A popular product for testing and fixing pages is called NetMechanic , this and other products will attempt to make sure your pages work properly.

If no one sees a web page, does the web page exist? For the non family site the answer generally is no, the site does not exist. Without eyeballs seeing the page, you might as well made a flyer and nailed it to a telephone pole. Web rings, a collection of like minded sites, are a great way to get started. It works to the mutual benefit of all, a "you scratch my back, I scratch your back " philosophy which is the way the least expensive forms of advertising work on the net. Banner advertising and traffic exchanges work the same way and are a cheap way of getting eyes to your pages. Having some free items could keep people coming back to your page after their initial visit, if they are the right style of freebies. There are other types of exchanges also available, such as exit exchanges and start page exchanges. If money is no object, you can also do e-mail advertising, traffic purchases or ezine advertising. However, the holy grail for most webmasters is a top listing on the major search engines. Now if you want a chuckle, click here , the top link is to a page that was advertised many years ago and most of the other links are broken. But Lococat is not a search phrase that many will use to get to my shopping site or web advice. There are sites listed in the resource and link section that give advice on getting a top search engine listing. There will be a history listed below as I attempt to get these pages into the search engines. Hopefully it goes well, I placed a bet that I would have 12,000 unique visitors to the shopping page, the counter on that page is for unique views only. Only 11,980 to go from 3/10/03. If you are feeling generous and can click on the page that would be great.

3/13/03, Haven't submitted to search engines yet as I'm still working on my meta and keywords description. Did send out an email today via Safelister which appears to be helping a little. Its an opt in email list with 17K+ members.

3/14/03 , had an e-mail asking me the difference between the traffic on the home page and shopping page. The home page counter if for the number of views only, and does not distinguish between repeat views. The shopping page is for unique views only, thus my count to 12K is based on getting 12,000 different computers to see that page. As I don't hack, drive, or do anything but advertise, it takes a little longer to get momentum. The home page should be over 3000 views as of 3/22/03. I will have the categories finished on the shopping page this weekend, the boutiques as of next week end and then the promotion starts.

3/15/03, finally got the bookmark us feature to work correctly. Went and got the code from the source here.

3/25/03 Well the good news was that the home page had over 3000 views on 3/22, the bad news is that the bookmarks don't work except in netscape. Found a couple other places that might work. This meta tag thing is a little confusing and taking a little longer than I would like.

4/4/03 Book marks are fixed, problem was a script location error. If you want to borrow it out of my page thats fine, let me know if you need guideance on changing anything. Tags are done, separate for the front page and the shopping page. Used AddPro for some search engine submission as it was free.