©1999 by Kurt Nemes

Looking at me, you'd probably think I don't look anything like a computer nerd. I'm wearing a suit. I look you in the eye when I talk. And I don't use technological jargon to make you think I'm smarter than you. (I also don't know the plot to every Star Trek and Star Wars movie, either.) But it just so happens that since January of this year, I have transformed myself into a web master. I'd like to tell you today how I went about creating my web site. While doing so, I will give you some tips on how to make your web site more effective, show you that it's easy and cheap to set up a web site, and third how to get people to come to it.

At the Bank, I'd set up a number of web sites used by clients needing information about the products and services my unit offers. These have been intended for internal use only, however, and I have felt that I'd missed the boat on the world-wide web. You probably know that thousands of web sites get put on line every day and that software and ways of doing things on the web are changing so rapidly it's mind boggling. You can read books, listen to music, look at great works of art, and find people with similar interests to your own. So there are lots of reasons for getting on the web, but I hadn't quite found my niche.

Some of you might know that on the side I've written freelance articles on parenting, food and travel. For a long time I have been wondering how my love of writing would be affected by changes taking place on the web. Then one day last December it all came together when my daughter asked me the question-Daddy what is your favorite piece of music?

She knows I love classical music and when I tried to answer my mind raced over all the composers I knew and all the pieces I liked. It occurred to me that I could probably come up with a list of several hundred pieces and that it might be interesting to put these on a web site, provide links to composers biographies, on-line places where people could buy the cd, and even places where you could listen to music. Thus I conceived the idea for "The Musical Almanac."

This brings me to the first lesson I learned about building a web-site, which can be summed up with the following acronym KISS, that is Keep It Simple Sweetie. There are two reasons for simplicity. If you've ever gone to a website with lots of graphics on it, what's the problem? It takes forever to load. What do you do when that happens? You hit the BACK button and go to a quicker site. Keeping it simple also makes it easy for your visitor to navigate through your site. Finally, keeping it simple, makes it simple for you to update, which is really important. In order to be successful on the web, you need to keep it updated often. If a person comes twice and sees exactly the same thing, chances are they'll never come back and never tell anyone else about it. I update my site every day.

Once I had my idea for my web site, I had to come up with a place to put it. The good news here for you is that you can create a website for free and it's very easy. You don't even know how to program to get started.

I'm handing out a list of places that I know of that give free web access. The one I chose, GeoCities gives you a whopping 11 MB of space on their server. What's the catch with these sites? Advertising. They will give you free home, but you must put a banner on your page into which they can load ads that people pay them for. That is how they generate their revenue.

Now here's the amazing thing. Most of these places have a wizard, that steps you through creation of the web site. After you register and provide them with some deomgraphic info and choose a password, they ask you what color scheme you'd like, what kind of menus you want, what pictures you'd like to add and then they give you places to type in the text, title, and keywords you want. It is amazingly simple.

If you want to get fancy and/or know some programming they give you an editor that allows you to go in and modify the code that determines how your page looks. If any of you ever used the old DOS wordprocessors like Wordstar or WordPerfect and remember how they formatted text with funny codes, it's not much more complicated than that. And here's something even more interesting. If you visit a web site and see something you like, there is a menu on Netscape or IE that says "view source code". If you do that, you see the formatting code that creates the way the page looks. Even more amazing, you can copy it! Then you can paste it into your file and modify it as you need. Some people call this plagiarism, but nobody complains. And if you ask the person who owns the page, they might be flattered and say OK. (They probably stole it from someone else.)

Now here is the most important thing I learned. You Can Build A Web Site but You Can't Make Them Come. Think back to the figures I gave you: every day, thousands of Web sites go on line. Think of the analogy to the information super highway. If you open a restaurant along I 95 and don't put a sign up for it, even though that might me a great location no-one's going to see it as they cruise past at 65 miles an hour. So you can put up a bill board with directions on how to get there. That might help. But what if you're miles away from the exit ramp. The best thing is to get your sign up for so it can be seen for miles and plop your restaurant down right next to the off ramp.

Well that's exactly how it is on the World Wide Web. The first thing to do is to submit your address to one or more of the search engines. You know the big ones-Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot. They used to go out and look for sites. Now, because of the sheer volume, they make you register with them. I don't know how many people they have doing this, but Yahoo says their turn around time is 4 to 6 weeks. I registered with them in January and they still don't have mine. There are commerical services that for a fee-several hundred dollars-will register you with all the big sites. But I don't know if it's worth it. There are search sites that search the other search sites-Metacrawler, WWW.37.COM, and WebCrawler. I've had better luck with these.

One thing about the search engines. Before you register with them, see where you think your site might fit in with them. They categorize their sites and as you find the place where you think yours fits, you can register on that list.

Related to this is the topic of key words. When you start building your site, you will be asked to supply keywords. Keywords get put into the code of your text and those are often what search engines look for. You can get keywords by looking at those precategories sites again. For example, for my web site, I put it in the keywords entertainment, music, classical, composers and then a few of the most popular composers.

One final way to advertise your web site is to network with people on line who have similar web sites. For example, I have visited a number of web sites on my searches for biographies and music files. If I put a link from my web site to theirs, I write to the web master and ask if he or she would consider linking back to mine. I've met some interesting people that way with whom I've started corresponding.

I realize that this is a lot of information to throw at you so let me just sum it up. First it's important to have a clear goal in mind before you start. Second, you can do it fairly easily and down right cheaply. And finally, even though you do it, the hardest part is getting your web site in the hand of the people who'd want to see it. With these tips, you might find too find yourself oneday like me, a web master.