HTML - An Introduction

Organising your site

If you are only building a small personal web site of 4-6 pages as in class, putting all your web pages in one folder is fine. As your site grows, or if you want to built a bigger site for a business or hobby, you may have a site with tens or hundreds of pages. It this case it make sense to group pages on the same broad subject area into sub-folders. e.g. a company might have a separate page for each product or product range and want to put all these into a folder called "products". The URL for pages in this folder would then become

 www.company.co.uk\products\index.htm or www.company.co.uk\products\pageone.htm etc.. 

The part of the URL up to the first slash is not case sensitive but everything after is. 

Ideally, the structure of the site should be thought through at design time because you will have to amend all the links if you alter the structure later on.

Testing your site

It is vitally important to test your site both before you publish it and afterwards to make sure that it works as you intended and that it can be viewed satisfactorily by at least the most popular browsers, preferably including earlier versions. This is particularly important if you have used any special effects.  You also need to check the accessibility of your site, with screen readers if possible.

Before publishing

Check that

• all internal hyperlinks work i.e. links to other pages or spots on your site
• all links to other websites work. You need to do this on-line but can do it before your site is "live"
• all mailto references work (ditto)
• the image references produce the images you want in the right places
• the spelling is OK!
• you have included your e-mail address if you want visitors to be able to contact you
• the site looks like you want it.  Look at it on friends' computers.

Try your site out in as many different browsers as you can. If you only have one installed on your PC, you can install another for free. Try Firefox at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. You can then view your site in different browsers. Alternatively, see if you can view it on another machine - at work or a friend's. This should have the additional benefit of testing how it looks on a different size screen. If you are really serious you should aim to test your site on several different versions of each browser.

After publishing

• Repeat the above processes via the internet.
• Check how long it takes each page to download (preferably using different machines). You may wish to rethink some of your pages if they take too long.
• Ask your friends to visit your site and give feedback.

Publishing

The first step in publishing your pages is contacting your Host or ISP (usually via their website) to get the specific instructions for uploading to their server. You will probably need to find the name the server, your username and password. You may also need to find out what the URL will be for accessing your website if using a free ISP.

There are a number of different ways of posting your web pages onto the server. You will need to get software which will allow you to transfer your pages to your host's server.

You will need to follow the instructions on the particular FTP software you choose but there are basic similarities in all the programs. You create an exact copy of your directory structure on the server and upload the files to the same folders.

Once the files are on the server, you can easily delete or rename them and create new directories. You can also download pages if you want to edit them and need to be sure that you are changing the version currently on the server. Alternatively if you update a page on your hard drive and re-upload it, the new version will overwrite the old one.

Advertising your site

If you only want your friends and family to view your site you don't need this. Just give them (e-mail) your URL. If you want the rest of the world to have a chance of finding your site, you need to take some positive action. Some suggestions follow.

Keywords

When people use a search engine to look for a site they type in a number of "keywords". There are a number of different ways you can help a search engine find your site by using these keywords.

• Titles. Make sure that the title you give each page in your site reflects some of these keywords. It helps if they consist of more than one word. They must also reflect the page's content.
• Heading styles - putting text into H1 etc, makes it more search-engine-friendly.
• Position. Keywords should also appear near to the top of the page if possible.
• Meta tags. You can enter your keywords in the <HEAD> section of your pages.
• See www.searchenginewatch.com for assistance on search engine optimization.

In the <HEAD> section of your index.htm page type:

You can also add in the <HEAD> section a summary of what your site is about for a search engine to display. e.g./p>

<META NAME = "description" CONTENT = "Bromley Adult Education College. Aiming to be the leading provider of adult education in Bromley."

Registering your URL at search engines

Follow directions from the home pages of the search engine you want to register you want to register with. This is free but be aware that it can take several weeks for the submission to work. It is a good idea to submit the 2 or 3 most important pages, not just your home page. Yahoo works differently from others like Google, Lycos, Altavista and Excite in that you have to find the right category in which to include your site. 

For a wealth of detailed information on search engines and how they work go to www.searchenginewatch.com 

Unfortunately there is no magic formula to enhance your page ranking with any search engine! There are however lots of hint and tips out there on the Internet, so do searches using terms like "search engine optimisation", "page ranking" and so on. Google is helpful for this.

Newsgroups

You can join a relevant newsgroup and post details of your website there.

Network among other students!

Submit your URL to me and I will advertise it on my website.  Please keep in touch and let me know when your sites are live. I like to see that you did actually achieve something!

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