1 to 7 Webcraft.ws Website Construction Training Course

Step 1 of 7 - Let's build the website!

" Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 50 mili-seconds (1/20th of a second), according to Canadian researchers. In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site's "visual appeal."
- Monster Webmaster

What this means is that your first impression of visitors will determine the eventual success. To use the wording of an chef I once worked for: "Make it pretty!"

Needless to say we could not possibly teach anyone html coding to create their own site in this tutorial. You don't have the time!

It would however remain the first choice for you to build your won site. I personally think it is a lot of fun and there are countless tutorials out there to help you do just this.

We offer you a list of services for you to test your website. - read more.

HTML Help:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

The Internet is made up of three basic elements:

CSS or Sourse code, Text and Pictures
Yes, audio and video technologies are growing fast. But if you hope to sell or entertain on the Net, it's critical to appeal to your audience. A huge percentage of these are still on dialup and certainly aren't very sophisticated and fancy techniques will isolate you from many of them.

For a great article on the effect of different colours on a site, please visit our articles section. - http://www.webcraft.ws

Domain tools:
http://whois.domaintools.com

So what are your choices if you want to build a website?

Register Your Domain Name:

Option A: SA domain registrations, domain registration co.za and .com R100 to register. http://www.sadomain.co.za

Option B: Afrihost.com - Click here to get the Best Web Hosting Evver!

.co.za Domain Administration:
http://co.za/whois.shtml - download this form for re-reg - http://co.za/legal/form_02.pdf with ID book copy certifyed.

Gov.za registrations http://dnsadmin.gov.za/reg/intranet/organ2.htm.

.com Domain Administration:
http://www.who.is/

Color Palette:
http://www.guistuff.com/tools/css/colorhex.htm

A) Buy a Template:
This can work. I've bought them myself and they do look great. But there are some aspects to consider:

. This can be expensive. I have bought a template for as little as $5 (R 35.00) and I have also paid as much as $1800 (R 11700)! Think carefully about your needs and weigh this up against the cost!

. If you don't know what you're doing, you can waste your money on templates that won't work for you. You will require a little html knowledge to work with templates and if you are a complete 'newbie' (new to the tech world), I would rather steer clear of this option.

If you do decide on this option, I would like to suggest going to this great site: http://www.templatemonster.com

B) Pay a Website Designer to Build a Site for You:
Hiring a professional can be expensive. I have done this in the past and it has been, without fail a very costly exercise. That is not the only reason why I am against thjis idea.

Every time you want to make a change on your site, you must wait on a designer to make the changes. This is expensive and can be time consuming, if the designer is busy with multiple clients.

Just like a purchased template, most web designers are focused on looks and appearance, rather than functionality. All the best marketers acknowledge that plainer sites are more lucrative because the focus is on the copy, the words, rather than fancy graphics or beautiful colors. Take a look at the top money-making sites on the net. They rarely are flashy or dramatically impressive.

Relying on a web designer creates dependency. Generally the motivation of entrepreneurs is freedom so waiting for another person to make even the smallest changes to your site isn't taking you in the direction you want to go.

I am not even going to recommend a designer. Sorry!

C) Buy Site-Making Software:
Every program I have seen involves a learning curve. One popular site builder, for example, has a 500 page manual, is expensive and a lot of the learning doesn't transfer to other site systems. I looked at another one recently with a 300 page manual. The time that you spend learning these methodologies could be spent learning an HTML editor that will make you fully capable of building your own sites, whenever you choose, for almost zero cost.

Thus, I would recommend spending the time and learning to do it yourself.

I personally spent two weeks in 'Frontpage Hell' several years ago. All reviews indicated that Frontpage is the best HTML editor, so I bought a book and determined to learn the software on my own. The first book wasn't long enough so I returned it for a second - and longer - book, which eventually was exchanged for an almost -1200 page manual. There were moments of frustration, tears, triumph, cursing and the thrill of success, and I emerged able to put together websites whenever I chose.

Saying "I want to be an Internet marketer" and not learning how to build websites for yourself is like wanting to be a dentist - and refusing to learn about teeth; like being a star athlete - and refusing to practice your sport. So what if your first sites won't win a design award? You'll get better. And you will be independent. Isn't that the entire point of working on the Internet?

Go on, learn and enjoy!

Meta Tags
The description, listing and ranking of sites on Search Engines are mostly determined by complex algorithms which gathers information from the following tags on your site, e.g. title, meta tags, body text, etc.

Meat tags are incredibly important and you should pay careful attention to them.

Meta tags should be placed in the <head> section of a site's front page and normally consist of a title, meta description and meta keywords. These are used to describe the content found on the site.

Website Description: This is the paragraph people see under the URL when the search engine results come up (Hint: shorter is better) Do not exceed 160 characters.

It is advisable not to repeat the same word more than twice within each of the above-mentioned tags, as most search engines have a built-in spamming detection feature. Should you repeat the same word too often, it might negatively influence your ranking in search engines.

The "title" tag contains the name or title of your web site with a short phrase describing the main products or service offered, while the "description" Meta tag contains a short description of your site. These two tags are important due to the fact that their content is extracted to form the name and summary of your site as displayed in the search results page.

Website Title: This appears on top of your page when printed. Not more than 59 characters.

The "keywords" meta tag should be used to include keywords that are relevant to your site and which in turn, will enable your site to be searchable. Beware not to use more than 100 words in this tag, as this will also be seen as spamming, which might in turn result in a negative ranking.

Keywords: Use the MOST IMPORTANT SPECIFIC words. Use single words or two word phrases. Do not repeat words. Keyword #1 is the highest priority, Keyword #10 the lowest priority. Do not exceed 600 characters.

Use the example below to help set up your meta tags:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Add an appropriate title for your site here </TITLE>
< META NAME="description" CONTENT=" Add an appropriate description of your site here ">
< META NAME="keywords" CONTENT=" word1, word2, word3, word4, .... ">
</HEAD>

<BODY>
...
</BODY>

</HTML>

Believe it or not, but that is the very scary thing called Meta tags!

Print Buttons

You can easily add a print button or link to your web page. To add a button use the following code:

The button looks like this:

To add a link you code it like this:

<a href="#" onclick="window.print();return false;">print</a>

The link looks like this: print

You can also easily control what parts of your page print out by adding a special stylesheet that will be used for printing to the head section of your page like this:

The print.css file should contain the following:

body {visibility:hidden;}
.print {visibility:visible;}

Now all you need to do is to assign class="print" to whatever parts of your web page that you want to have print out. Anything on the page not assigned to this class will not print.

Try printing this page to see how it works.

By now I hope you have everything we need to get your site live and going. Now we just need to go through a final check list!

Click here to return to the Top.

Author Informarion: Gerald Crawford was born in South Africa, studied electronics, telecommunication, eco-travel and african travel concepts. He taught responsible tourism in South Africa. If you have any questions or comments please e-mail me on. E-mail Address: southafricantravelarticles@12234455.co.za

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