Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Introduction

These days, it’s all but impossible to find someone who hasn’t heard of the Internet. Companies create websites before they make business plans. Political activists skip the debates and trash-talk their opponents online. Even formerly technophobic grandmothers spend hours emailing old friends (and selling the odd family heirloom on eBay). The Internet has even changed our language: Google and friend are now verbs, for example, and tweet has nothing to do with birds.

As you no doubt know, you can establish a web presence in many ways. You can chat with friends through a Facebook page, share pictures with like-minded photographers on Flickr, put your home videos on YouTube, or write short diary-style blurbs on a blog hosted by a service like Blogger. But if you’re ambitious enough to have picked up this book, you’re after the gold standard of the Web: a bona fide website to call your own.

So what can you accomplish with a website that you can’t do with email, social networking, and other web-based services? In a word: anything.

Is your personal website just a permanent place to stash your résumé or the hub of an e-commerce warehouse that sells personalized underpants? (Hey, it’s made more than one millionaire.) The point is that a website of your own gives you the power to decide exactly what it is—and the control to change everything on a whim. If you’re already using other web-based services, like YouTube and Facebook, you can make them a part of your website, as you’ll learn in this book. For example, why not put the YouTube videos of your cat playing pool right inside your website, next to your personalized cat merchandise?

Of course, with great power comes great responsibility—meaning that if you decide to build your own site, it’s up to you to make sure it doesn’t look as hokey as a 1960s yearbook portrait. That’s where this book comes in. With this book by your side, you’ll learn how to:

• Create web pages. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language of the Web. Over the last decade, a modernized version HTML, called XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language), gradually eclipsed HTML, and now is joined by another new version known as HTML5. In this book, you’ll sort through these standards and learn how to write the most up-to-date, reliable web pages.

• Make pages look beautiful using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS picks up where HTML leaves off, adding formatting muscle that can transform the drabbest of sites into a family of coordinated pages that look like they were professionally designed. Best of all, once you understand the right way to use CSS, you’ll be able to apply a new look to your entire site by tweaking just a single file.

• Put your website online. The world’s greatest website isn’t much good if no one sees it. That’s why you’ll learn how to choose the best web hosting company, pick a domain name (like www.HotToTrotHorses.com), and get your masterpiece online. Don’t panic—plenty of cheap web hosting companies are ready to show off your site for pennies a day.

• Attract visitors. You’ll learn how to make sure people can find your site using popular search engines and how to build an online community that encourages repeat visits.

• Get rich (or at least earn some spare change). The Web is a linchpin of retail commerce, but even ordinary people can make money hawking their favorite merchandise (through Amazon), selling their own products (using a payment service like PayPal), or displaying ads (with Google). You’ll learn how to get in on the action.

• Pile on the frills. Every website worth its salt has a few cool tricks. You’ll learn how to dazzle visitors with cool buttons, slick menus, and other flashy elements, courtesy of JavaScript. You’ll even learn how to (shudder) serenade visitors with background music.

What You Need to Get Started

This book assumes that you don’t have anything more than a reasonably up-to-date computer and raw ambition. Although there are dozens of high-powered web editing programs that can help you build a website, you don’t need one to use this book. In fact, if you use a web editor before you understand how websites work, you’re liable to create more problems than you solve. That’s because, as helpful as these programs are, they shield you from learning the principles of good site design—principles that can mean the difference between an attractive, easy-to-maintain web creation and a disorganized design nightmare.

Once you master the basics, you’re welcome to use a fancy web-page editor like Microsoft Expression Web or Adobe Dreamweaver. In this book, you’ll get an overview of how these two leading programs work, and you’ll discover a few great free alternatives (in Chapter 4).

Note

Under no circumstances do you need to know anything about complex web programming technologies like Java or ASP.NET. You also don’t need to know anything about databases or XML. These topics are fascinating, but insanely difficult to implement without some solid programming experience. In this book, you’ll learn how to create the best possible website without becoming a programmer. (You will, however, learn just enough about JavaScript to use many of the free samples you can find online.)