Help Stefan Campaign
Making Money from the Web:
Setting-up your own Website
You have reached this page, so you must be serious about setting-up your own website. Essentially there are two main types of website you can: a content-based site, where traffic is driven to the website based on its having something unique to say; and a commercial website where content is driven to the website based on a product or products it is trying to sell.
I shall deal primarily with content-based sites here though many of the principles and techniques I'm going to mention will be the same for both.
Creating your Website:
By now you will have signed-up with someone who will give you some space on which to deliver your website or you have purchased your domain name and somewhere to host it. You may even have a few web pages available. However, unless you're generationg academic content, to make any real money from the website you need quality content and a good ranking on the search sites. As well as good content your website should also look professional.
For a content-based site the trend these days is for the actual content section to look like a printed page. That is, the part you want to read lies in the middle of the web page. Advertisements and navigation tools as well as web-site branding are placed to the left, to the right and above the content, respectively (precisely like this page in fact). You could use a web-page generation tool to create your web pages and there are a number of good ones, such as FrontPage out there. There are even a number of free and shareware tools out there for generating web pages. These are quite good in many respects and you can use them to create great looking websites including many whizzy additions like JavaScript and Flash.
However, don't go overboard with the 'whizzy' stuff as this can make your site look over complicated and even unprofessional. Basically a clean design is a good design. The exception being if you're writing a commercial site to display your code-generating abilities.
Don't get too comfortable with the code-writing applications though. They are great up to a point. However, they are almost all optimized for code that works with Windows and Explorer. If you have more than plain HTML pages your code may not work with any of the other browsers out there, FireFox, Safari, Opera and so on. You may think that these browsers don't matter as they only constitute a small proportion of the overall customer base. But once you've annoyed someone by not catering for their browser then you've lost them and any revenue they may have generated for you.
Also, if your code does not work with the current generation of the FireFox browser then it is not standards compliant. This means that your code is liable to break if there is a browser update. However, the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) offers a number of tools such as the HTML validator which can be found here. Use these tools, they will help you in the long run.
Of course, when thinking about how good you want your code to be consider how long your website is going to remain active and serving the same content. The longer you think this might be then the more time it's worth spending on the code up-front as it'll save you time in the end.
Future-proofing your code
If your site is going to be there for a long while or if you want to change the design of your site often then it's probably worthwhile for you to learn about CSS (cascading style sheets). It's how I've coded this website. A single tweak of the CSS style sheet allows me to alter the appearance of the entire website. No more changing each and every individual page to perform a global change. It's a very powerful technology and a W3C standard. If you want to see what CSS can do then take a look at the amazing CSS Zen Garden site. There are even 'CSS code generation tools' becoming available (simply use this as a search page in the Google search box below). This is also an accepted standard and will work on each and every browser.
To get you started here are a list of books to help you with website design and the technologies needed to design and write your own website. They start-off simply and become more complex as you progress down the list:
Designing your website: UK here and US here
Writing HTML: UK here and US here
Writing DHTML and XHTML: UK here and US here
Using CSS: UK here and US here
Using JavaScript: UK here and US here
Using Flash: UK here and US here