Design & Maintenance

Creating the Layout & Content, and Maintaining Your Site ...

We'll look at several ways of developing and maintaining the content of your website ...setting up the layout and appearance as well as the text and images that reside on the site. This is called "web authoring."

ONLINE Development Tools ...

In our discussion on hosting, we mentioned several services that provide online authoring tools; each of these gives you the option of choosing among various themes or layouts, then customizing them according to your needs and tastes. This is a good way to start out. We'll discuss a few ... there are many more.

www.Hostsite.com - Simple online website building tools included at no additional cost with hosting packages. Shopping carts, payment processing, traffic statistics, and more. Can host sites designed with offline software. Tech support good, but best contacted via e-mail. Turnaround time reasonably quick, but not immediate.

www.GoDaddy.com - There are online site builders available, so you can create your site online if you wish, or upload a site you've developed off-line. One of their development packages is called Website Tonight. Excellent help available via phone 24/7/365.

sites.Google.com (Google Sites) - Online site-building process, but as with the others mentioned above, you will work within a set of themes and templates rather than doing totally creative design. Because it's online and operates via browser, it works for both PC and Mac ... and it's ENTIRELY FREE. Google Sites provides several major features that are unique ... you can easily determine if your site is accessible to the world, or only to people you "invite" (via their e-mail addresses) ... and you can also designate one or more people to be "collaborators" ... to have access to edit the site. This is helpful if you have different people responsible for the content in separate parts of the site ... they don't have to funnel everything through you, the owner. It integrates very well with the huge range of other Google services, including Google Docs ... we won't have time for an in-depth discussion of these other Google services ... they're going to be covered in a separate class. Unlike the services described above, Google has NO provision for hosting a site developed offline.

www.Homestead.com - Another integrated online service with themes and templates you choose and customize. Very good demo. Free trial for 30 days, but the kicker is that you have to register and give them a credit card number to set up the account ... then you can cancel if you choose not to proceed, but it's quite inexpensive. Commerce modules available, many other features. Like Google, you can't upload a site created offline.

iWeb - Specifically for Mac users, this service also provides themes and templates ... and my Mac user friends have told me there are several other options ... but I have no personal experience with these.

OFFLINE Development Tools (installed on your computer)

If you'd prefer to have a completely flexible and open-ended design process, you will need to purchase and install a web authoring package on your computer. There are many available ... we'll mention just two. If you do it this way, you will obtain space from a hosting provider, several of which are mentioned above ... many are available. You'll get "FTP" parameters from them, enabling you to upload your completed website to their web server, and to subsequently upload new pages and images whenever the site is updated. FTP capability is built into Xara and Dreamweaver.

Xara Web Designer ... www.xara.com - From a British company called Xara, this is a hugely powerful and fast set of development tools good enough for the professional designer, but inexpensive enough for a beginner at $50. PC only, no Mac version. Comes with a large set of templates and other design elements which you can use (and freely modify), or you can design from scratch. You can download a fully functional copy of the program and use it for 30 days. There's a learning curve, but the built-in help is first-rate, and there's a lot of online support, including tutorials, demos, and a terrific user forum. A how-to session is out of scope of this class, but if there's enough interest, perhaps we can offer a class on Xara in the future. There's a premium version that incorporates all their graphic design tools AND all the web design tools, called Xara Designer Pro. I use this software and will demo on request.

Dreamweaver ... www.adobe.com - From Adobe, this is the King Kong of web authoring software, available for Mac or PC. It's not cheap, and the learning curve is daunting to a lot of folks. But if your goal is to get up to speed and get a job in the industry, sooner or later you're going to want to get up to speed on Dreamweaver. We're not going to go into detail on this product in this class, other than to say it's excellent, it's expensive, but probably not for those just starting out. There are many good classes on Dreamweaver available through a variety of educational programs.

MAINTAINING Your Site ...

Once your site is set up, unless it's something like a static brochure for a business, with little more than a summary of services and contact info, you're going to need to maintain it. If you're using online development tools, you'll sign into your account to make modifications to your site. f you've used offline development software, you'll edit your "master copy" offline, and then upload the changes to the web server using FTP (file transfer protocol) software. Either way, when you lay out the site, if you can keep the things that need changing in relatively few places, it's easier to maintain than if you have stuff that needs updating scattered all over the site