How to Create a Website

Overview
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It is very important to statistically track visitors to your website. Web tracking software provides a wealth of information about website visitors that can help you improve your web content, navigational structure and "stickiness". Good information will help you formulate great strategies that will ultimately lower your costs and increase your revenues.

A good hit tracker provides answers to the following types of questions:

Many web page developers seem to think that if you build a page, people will come. Unfortunately, life isn't quite so simple. With several billion pages on the Internet, the odds of someone bumping into yours is rather remote, unless it is well promoted.

Web page promotion entails registering your URL with one or more search engines and portals.

There are literally hundreds of search engines in existence today. Although it is free to add your URL to some search engines, the registration effort does take time. Most major search engines now charge fees for registration.

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Copying files from your hard drive to the server is a simple process. The host site will prompt you for the name of the directory on your hard drive where your files are stored and the names of the specific files to be uploaded. To avoid confusion, make certain that all files are saved on the server using the same file names that were used on your hard drive. The only software that you require to upload files is a web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. Alternatively, free FTP software (File Transfer Protocol) can be used.

At this point, construction of your home page is complete but your page still resides on your computer, not on the internet. If you log on to the Internet, however, you should be able to test all your links to external web sites.

You are now ready to publish your page on the World Wide Web. To do this, you will need to copy your page and all graphic and music files which your page uses from your computer's hard drive to a web server (computer).

Once the HTML editor is installed, you are ready to begin construction. The first thing to do is to orient yourself to the HTML editor. Most products have a tutorial and "help" features. In general, however, they are intuitive and function much like word processors.

HTML editors let you insert images into the body of a document and create hyperlinks to other pages. They also permit you to reference a file to be used as a background image. Most HTML editors allow you to insert additional HTML code wherever you like. This is useful, for example, should you want to add a page counter, music or video clip.

Unless you want to learn how to program, you will need to download a good HTML editor from the net. An HTML editor is tool that generates a computer program in HTML using a sophisticated word processor. There are many good HTML editors available and many are free. They are sometimes called "WYSIWYG HTML Editors" (What You See is What You Get).

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It is important to maintain structural consistency throughout your website. Each page should have at least a common header, footer and navigation menu. There are two methods to structure web pages: using "tables" or "divisions" (i.e. div tags).

The use of tables to group and align text can help make a page more attractive. Tables are fast to load and are easily generated from most HTML Editors. The spacing between table cells and the borders around the cells can be altered or made invisible. Text and graphics within table cells can be right justified, left justified or centered.

Once you know exactly what you intend to publish and who the targeted audience will be, the next step is to determine the mood of your website. Should the ambience be informal, professional or high tech? Will you use graphics, animation or music? How will the text be structured and which fonts will be used? How will visitors navigate through your site? Whatever you decide, try to maintain the same theme and conventions throughout your site.