Make your website work

What’s in a website?
So what do you want your website to do, and what do you need to make it do that? First things first, you need hosting – a web server that will store your pages and make them available to the rest of the internet. For all but the most trivial of sites, you need a suitable domain name of your own, too, so that people can find the site easily.

You need the site itself – and that could be anything from a collection of basic HTML pages to a more sophisticated database-driven site, packed with interactivity, or a multimedia extravaganza, with video clips, audio and the latest Web 2.0 features.

To put all that together, you’ll need the appropriate tools to create and manage all the web content – unless you go down the route of paying someone else to create the site for you.

If you’re making the leap from a simple site hosted on your ISP’s free web space, or on a free service, it might be tempting to sign up for a cheap hosting deal or grab a domain right away and then buy web-design software. But don’t do that just yet. All the decisions you need to make are interlinked and will impact on each other.

It’s far better to plan and decide how you want to build your site than to just grab what looks like a good deal, only to discover further down the road that it’s not suitable for what you want, leading to more expense and hassle.

At the most basic level – and this is something we’ll come back to later – the choice between Linux and Windows operating systems for a hosting server can have a massive impact on how easy it will be to use particular technologies for a website. All these questions have answers, though they might be different for each site.

Ultimately, they come back to the first thing you need to ask yourself about your website – what’s it for? Do you want to share information with people and tell them about yourself or your products? Or do you want to use a site to run a business, allowing people to request information or buy things online? Are you hoping to build a community where people can share information or experiences with each other?

From these basic questions flow others. How often will information need to be updated? Will you need to keep track of users? Will the site need to accept online transactions? Who’s going to design it? Or keep it up to date? How often will it change? How will people find your site? What would make the site a success – lots of visitors, or a few visitors who return regularly, or new contacts for work?

At its simplest, if your aim is a site that’s largely informational and won’t change, then your choice is easy – you can use just about any hosting service, and just about any web design tool – even, if you’re strapped for cash, knocking up the pages in Microsoft Word or Open Office – to create a set of static pages that you can upload from your PC to the website, refreshing the site each time you make a change.

It's pretty much the same as doing a simple home page in your ISP’s space, but with proper third-party hosting. But if you’re reading this article, the chances are you want something more sophisticated than that.

Picture this
Before we look at some of the more complicated options, there’s another type of site that doesn’t necessarily need lots of hard work to set up – a photo site. Whether you want to show off your amateur photography, catalogue the restoration of a classic car, or allow grandparents around the world to keep up with your family, an online gallery is a popular type of site.

Thankfully it’s also one of the easiest to make, with plenty of tools available to take the hard work out of tasks such as generating preview pictures or building index pages.

We look at how to make galleries in some detail here but, in summary, many photo-editing programs, including Photoshop, ACDSee and Irfanview, all have tools built in that allow you to create a web album with just a few clicks.