Providing Creative Alternatives

Web site software: From no-cost to pricey

You want a program that enables you to see what your page will look like... wysiwyg, or "what you see is what you get."

And you want a program that allows you to tweak the HTML code. You may not think you would want to learn HTML, but sooner or later, you are likely to need some. It's not that hard to do.

There are a number of low-cost and free programs. Go to tucows.com or any other shareware directory and search on web authoring programs. Get one that you can try out free for 30 days or however long they give you, and really work with it to see how you like it.

Web site software: what we do

My husband and I both use Dreamweaver, which has a very steep learning curve and relatively high price. You can read about it at the Adobe site, and download a trial version there. I also bought a book about Dreamweaver, to use as a reference, and it has helped me out many times.

The thing I like best about Dreamweaver is that I can create a template for a site, and then create my pages based on that template. If I decide to change something on every page, I just change it on the template and bingo! It will change all the pages. For example on this page, if I wanted to change the copyright at the bottom, I would use that feature. There may be other programs that have this feature, or a global search-and-replace might be good enough too.

Creating web pages

Think a little about what you want your page to look like. I recommend a design rather like what this page is, except that likely you would start out by having the background of a page be a not-too-bright color, rather than the design I use here on hartworks.com. That can be set in the page properties.

Then create a table with one row and one column, at about 60% width. Give it a white background and a colored border. Center it. This will be your text area.

Page layout with tables isn't ideal. They aren't as easy for search engines to read and sometimes what gets listed on the search engine isn't what you hoped. I recently found a web site that gives a table trick to get around this. You would have to understand a little HTML for this to be helpful.

There is another way of doing page layout, using CSS. This creates pages with less code on them, and allows you to do things you can't with a table layout. I'm moving in this direction myself. If you are totally new to web page creation, don't worry about this for now. Though if you are going to immerse yourself in how to create pages, start out with CSS and you won't have to switch later. It's clearly the wave of the future! There are many good CSS sites... here's a very artistic site about using CSS. It shows how the same site would look with different CSS definitions.

Once you have a page format that you like, save it with a name like mytemplate.htm, and use it as a basis for other pages. Like in a word processor, you would do this by opening mytemplate.htm and then saving it as whatever.htm, with a new page name every time you do this. Name your home page index.htm (or index.html... it doesn't matter which format you use on your site, .htm or .html, but be consistent.)

If you use Dreamweaver, there is an easier way to do templates.... read its help files

Writing the Text

Now it's time to do some writing of the text that will go on the page. It's just a first draft, so don't sweat bullets over it yet. Once you have a few paragraphs and maybe some images, look at it in terms of design. Make some titles, if you haven't already, and use your software to turn them into headings. Don't run long paragraphs, as you might in a book, because it's much easier when reading on a computer screen if there is a lot of white space.

When you are ready to revise your draft, read it from the point of view of a web surfer. Do you tell them in the first few lines what the page is about? Don't be chatty at first, just get to the point so readers will stick around a while. Now is the time to work hard on what you are saying. Got writer's block? Just write anything at first... revising is much easier than getting started!

When I've got my text done, I read it aloud, which is the best way I know to catch errors. Then I spell-check it, look it over for how it looks on the page, be sure my keyword or key phrase is sprinkled through the headers and text, be sure I have done a title, keyword, and description. I also be sure I have put in alt descriptions of any images.

I've reached the point where I like web site software more than word processing software! Once you have done a few pages, you will have the hang of it.

Be sure to read my pages on search engine optimization and making a web site for more tips.