First, find a host for your web page. There are several free hosting services on the internet, and there's no point in deplenishing the troop's budget any more than we have too, is there?
Now that a place to put the site has been found, we need to create a site. This is a lot easier than it sounds as most of the web hosting services have some sort of html editor. If you don't know any html, don't worry. There are tons of html primers on the net. Some of them are listed below.
Just a few basics real quick. Always include the folowing on every web page (lines in black should be enclosed within < and > when you actually write the page):
HTML
HEAD
TITLE Page title goes here
/TITLE
/HEAD
BODY This is where you specify what color (or picture) the background will be and what color the links and text will be. This page's body line is: BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#FF0000" which means that the background is white, the text is black, links are blue and visited links are red. You can also use the color names instead of the hexadecimal code. So we could have written it as: BODY BGCOLOR="white" TEXT="black" LINK="blue" VLINK="red"
Main part of document goes here
/BODY
/HTML
Once you get the hang of it, when you see something neat on someone's site, just take a look at the source code (View/Source in IE, View/Document Source in Netscape) to see how they did it.
This brings us to our next section, plagiarism. Don't do it! NEVER TAKE ANY UNIQUE GIFS, JPGS, BMPS, IMAGE MAPS, OR TEXT FROM SOMEONE'S PAGE WITHOUT THEIR DIRECT PERMISSION! I really can't stress that enough. Stealing gifs from other's pages goes against the scout law and is potentially illegal. It's ok to copy a Netscape or Internet Explorer GIF, but anything else should be requested through email. As a corollary to this, if another scout troop asks to use one of your images, let them!
Be sure to register your site with all the search engines you can find. An easy way to do this is to sign up with Postmaster, Submit-it!, and/or Add Me. These are all services that will, for a fee, register a site with lots of search engines. Each of these also will sign you up with the most popular engines, yahoo, lycos, alta vista, etc. for free.
Web rings are another good way to increase traffic to your site and to find other related pages. I suggest The Scouts Ring (La Anilla Scout). It's an international ring, so scouts from all over will see your site.
If you run out of room, don't forget that web browsers don't care where the link they are following resides, as long as the linked place is correct. So, if space is getting tight, but you don't want to remove the pictures from last years Phillmont Trek (very understandable, btw), simply start up another account on one of the other services, upload whatever to the new address, and link to it from the old page. If you do this, make sure that you copy the index.html to the new server. Hopefully, the HTML was coded correctly and the links will still work. If not, just change the links from, for example, href="philmont.jpg" to href="http://www.xoom.com/troop43/philmont.jpg". IF this is done correctly, you'll now have two different URLs that will bring up identical copies of the troop's homepage. This can also be used to keep patrol pages from accidentally being erased: each patrol can have their own web site with their own password and user id, linked from the troops web site.
If this has been a little confusing, I do apologize. Email me if you have any questions.
Michael Herring
Assistant Scoutmaster, Troop 43