Web Design Tips and Tricks

Creating the Perfect Website - A beginners Guide

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Are you looking to create the perfect website? A complete novice when it comes to HTML, CGI, FTP and all the other associated pieces that make up the website puzzle, then this article is definitely for you.

By following the 5 guidelines listed below you are guaranteed to create the perfect website.

1. Plan your website

Creating a plan of your website will help you identify the purpose of your website and will also help you to see how many pages you will require. You should then research similar sites to see how they appeal to their target audience. You should also make a list of the tools that you will require, for example do you intend to have a guestbook, a message board, a chat room, a web journal or blog. How often do you intend to update your site? Are you going to sell products from your site?

By answering all of the above questions you will have a very clear perception of what your website will be about and what you will need to get it up and running. You can then move on to step 2.

2. Finding the right hosting service

Choosing the right hosting service will depend on your individual needs and having created your website plan this will make choosing the right host a lot easier. Before paying for hosting I recommend that you check out some of the free hosting companies. Here you can host your website for free and learn about web-building in the process.

Here are a few of the sites that I trialled:-

www.bravenet.com – This site allows you to have your own free website yourname.bravenet.com. The tools on this site are excellent and include a guestbook, message board, web journal and site counters to name but a few. They also have a website builder which is very important for the novice user. Great templates and also easy to use.

www.frandt.com – Offers free web hosting yourname.frandt.com. Another great site with many tools.

www.tictacwebsites.com – You can get a 10 day free trial from this website. Another great site with an abundance of facilities. If you decide to use them hosting is $20/month.

There are many more hosting services available and a quick search for free hosting or paid hosting will give you a huge list. I will recommend that as a novice you start with the free hosting services. This is some great advice that I would have loved to receive prior to starting my website.

3. Starting Your Website

Once you have chosen your hosting company the next thing is to start building your website. Using the site builders is the best way. You choose your template and then start imputing your content. Don’t worry about getting everything in on the first attempt, you can always edit your pages as you go along.

If you are intending to put in e-mail forms for subscriptions or feedback most hosting companies have this in their tools section. If not you can just create a link to your e-mail account.

Do not worry about adding pictures and advertisements, these can all come at a later stage, for now the main priority is to get your website up and running.

4. Publishing Your Website

Once your website is completed the next stage is to publish it on the web. Your hosting company will have a facility for this. This usually involves submitting your website to various search engines. You may also be required to create keywords and meta tags. Keywords are words that will be picked up by search engines and will help generate more traffic for your website. Try looking for keyword software. Some web hosting companies do all this for you which are an extra bonus.

Now that you are published on the web you are ready to move on to the last step.

5. Promoting Your Website

This is where the frustration begins. You have your website, it’s on the internet but how do I get people to visit it. There are numerous ways to get traffic and the internet is full of ways to do this. Joining a traffic system is probably the best. I use traffic swarm to promote my website and also instant buzz. Both of these have really worked for me and have increased my traffic significantly. Another way is to advertise, you can place adverts for free but this can be extremely time consuming has to go to each website individually. I used adblaster, a great piece of software that allows me to type my ads and them with the click of just one button my ads are submitted to over 2500 websites. Ezine articles are another way of getting people to your site. Check the ezine directories and submit your articles.

Now that you have the knowledge, why not get started creating your own website. If you need free advertising I provide it on my website.

Firing a function from your browser

The concept is as simple as firing a function from your browser, and it leans on PHP's call_user_func_array.

I'm going to outline the concept as I have implemented it. This exact implementation may not work in your case, but perhaps you can adapt it to do so.

if(isset($_GET['f']) && function_exists($_GET['f'])) {
$func = $_GET['f']; // Get function name.
unset($_GET['f']); // Drop function from from get.
// Fire and print function, passing 
// remaining GETs as function parameters.	
print_r(call_user_func_array($func, $_GET)); 
exit;
}

In our CMS/Framework, we set up a controller with the code from above to respond at a given URL, for example http://www.example.com/__FOO. By passing a function name as a GET variable, in this case 'f', and the parameters necessary for that function to work as subsequent GET parameters, the result of that function will be printed to the screen.

So, http://www.example.com/__FOO?f=hello_foo&a=world would fire the function hello_foo('world'), perhaps printing Hello World! to the screen.

This allows for a quick and dirty test of a given function, and can be done remotely on a live site, if necessary, without touching any files or whatnot.

We hide this behind an authorization wall and also clean our parameters before they get to this level, so if you try this, keep these points in mind.

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