These pages consist of two sections: the first introduces the infrastructure needed to host websites with differing requirements; the second discusses issues concerned with the content of the site. They are intended to give an overview of the bits and pieces that are needed to put together a website for a small company or individual.
This is not a DIY manual, it aims to be a guide for managers who are thinking about having a company website. Issues such as database and online payment are introduced, but we ignore options such as dedicated servers that would be beyond the expertise of a typical small company wishing to set up their first website.
There are a number of elements needed to set up a web site, some are common to all sites and some are needed only by those with more advanced requirements. Most firms would use the services of a web design company, and they would guide you or manage the whole process for you. There are one or two traps to avoid when the design company manages everything, namely arranging for a domain name and hosting company — details are in the relevant sections.
This is the www.somebody.com address used to access individual sites. These names are unique and once someone has registered that name, it is not available to anybody else. Whilst it is not expensive to register your own domain name, it can be tricky finding one that hasn't already been taken. When choosing a name it is best to avoid names that include less-common words, words that are difficult to spell, or those that have alternative spellings.
The .com part is called the domain extension, today there is a wide variety of extensions such as .co.uk, .info, .biz, .tv, and .me. See the full list of each country's domain extension.
It is usually best to register your domain name through the web hosting company that you intend to use as it saves you a little administrative work in transferring your domain name to a different hosting company for which there may be a small charge.
Beware of scams: expect to pay between about five and twenty pounds per year for your domain name, some people will try to panic you into buying a domain name before it is taken by someone else and charge a hundred pounds or more for the name only.
If your web design company or other third party is registering for you, make sure they register it in your name and payment is arranged through you. A few companies will arrange everything for you, use their name, and pay through their bank. It may be done with the best intentions but they will have legal control over your domain name and where it is hosted.
You can check for available names, or read more about domain names with the relevant controllers: Nominet for UK entries,, or try Icann for global entries.
The controllers do not provide domain names themselves, accredited registrars do this. Many registrars are web hosting companies. The controllers have lists of accredited registrars via links on their site.
You do not need to have your own computer with specialist software connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, every day. It is usual to hire space on someone else's computers (web servers) to store the pages which make up your website; web hosting companies provide this service. A reputable web host uses computers that are specially designed for handling websites and housed in temperature controlled, air-conditioned secure buildings. Their staff will maintain the computers and software and provide new equipment as necessary, all at no extra cost to you.
The web server has software that delivers pages requested by users, although Microsoft Enterprise Server is becoming more common, the most popular software by far is still Apache Web Server, which is used more than all other web server software combined.
Your package will typically include e-mail facilities allowing you to have me@mysite.com and possibly a few dozen more.
Restrictions on your site include the amount of disk space available for your text, graphics and database tables. A second restriction is the amount of data received and sent out from your site. Unless your pages contain many high-resolution graphics or you are providing video or sound files for people to download, the amount of space and bandwidth is usually sufficient — but make sure as the charges for exceeding your allocated amount are invariably high.
There is often no need to get every facility you may possibly need in the future; you can usually start with a modest package , as many hosting companies will allow you to upgrade to a higher specification package just by paying the difference in price. However, make sure that this is the case with your chosen company before you sign..
Be aware that small web-design companies that offer web hosting services are unlikely to have their own web server - they are more likely to be acting as sales agents for the company which hosts their site. Check your agreement to ensure that you have control of your website should anything go wrong with the design company.
Hosting packages cost from under £5.00 per month for a no-frills account, to around £40.00 per month for a fully-fledged e-commerce system. A package that includes database and custom scripting facilities is around £10.00 per month. Payment is usually taken by credit card, in advance.
To make a start in your search for a suitable host you could do worse than to try these: Internet magazine's top ten hosting companies or Future publishing 2002 winners. Netcraft produce a list of hosting companies with high uptimes.
As far as people visiting your site are concerned it doesn't make the slightest difference whether your site is hosted on a site based on Windows servers or whether it is hosted on Unix system, or a free Unix-like system such as Linux (actually Gnu/Linux, to give it its full title) or any other system. No matter which system you are using, and no matter which system they are using they will be able to access your site.
Linux based hosting is most widely used — about 60% of websites around the world use Linux and about 20% use other versions of Unix. This compares with about 20% using Windows — see the current state of play. Linux has traditionally been the most robust and secure system, though Windows XP Enterprise servers are sturdier than their older servers.
Linux has the widest choice of tools, programming languages and database systems on offer; Windows tend to use Active Server Pages (ASP) with Visual Basic as the main programming language and MS SQL Server as the database server. Some cheaper Windows hosting packages offer MS Access but usually this is only suitable for light duties as it was only intended for small workgroups.
Programming on the web is normally referred to as scripting. Scripts that run on the web server are called server-side scripts while those that run inside the browser from the web page are known as client-side scripting (things such as browsers that make use of information from the web are called web clients).
This section is a little off-topic but is included here (instead of in the 'Web pages and content section') for continuity. Client side scripting is used to check that the user has entered valid looking information on a form, to do animated menus and anything that is best done at the user's end. It is also misused to open pop-up windows with advertisements, alter the size of your browser and other annoying things. No surprise then that many people set their browser to disallow scripting off; this is a shame, as when it is used properly it can enhance a page and give functionality that is genuinely useful to the user.
The moral is: Don't let your design company make pages that are useless if scripting has been disabled.
Server side scripting is used things such as querying a database and security checks. Server side scripting cannot be turned off by the user.
If your website needs to do more than display text and graphics you will need a hosting package that allows you to run your own custom scripts. For example, websites that are capable of accepting information from the person visiting that site need to provide some response be it taking order details or looking up and presenting information from a database. A computer program known as a script is needed to process the information provided by your visitor and create a suitable web page on the spot.
If you plan to accept information from your visitors then your hosting package should include one or more of the following:
Be careful, ensure that the hosting package allows you to provide your own scripts; some packages only allow their own (pre-written) scripts to be run.
If you have more than a few products to mention on your site, or if you want to take information from visitors to your site then you should seriously consider choosing a hosting package that includes a database management system such as MySQL, PostgreSQL or MS SQL. Try and avoid cheaper packages that only include MS Access unless you are sure that you will only ever have a very small amount of information to store — Access is good for personal or small group use but was never designed for use on the Web. Packages that include database facilities invariably include programming facilities but do make sure that custom scripts are allowed.
Remember you will need to register under the Data Protection Act if you store anyone's personal details. It would also be very wise in these circumstances to select a package that includes a secure connection - look for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or the more recent TSL (Transport Layer Security).
Your web design company will create the pages offline; they will then upload them to your server. Three methods are typical:
Your host provides pages that ask for the location of the pages on your hard disk and uploads them to the folder you specify on their disk (within your own allocated folder of course).
The second method is to use the File Access Protocol (FTP) to upload and download pages and graphics. Modern ftp programs look and work like Windows Explorer making transferring pages a simple point and click affair.
The third method is only found on more advanced and more expensive packages. This allows you to control your part of their machine as if it were our own using a secure shell.
Taking orders online is part of setting up an online shop; the other part is getting the money. Some traders will find it perfectly satisfactory to use a reservation system where articles that have been ordered by someone are put to one side and dispatched when the customer's cheque arrives. For situations where payment needs to be quicker, credit card handling needs to be considered. Even if your business has existing credit card facilities, it may be difficult and expensive to convince the credit card company to let you use the service over the Internet due to the risk of hacking and subsequent fraud.
There is a small number of companies that offer a scheme to provide you with online payment facilities (e-payment). You will need to register with them and usually pay a registration fee. Their secure site processes any payments for orders made on your site, they will take a percentage of the payment and credit you with the remainder a short while later. Since their business depends on confidence in their procedures you can feel sure that their security measures are second to none and almost certainly safer than ordinary point of sale systems used in small premises. Some of these companies are:
We deliberately omitted PayPal as there is some controversy over their trading techniques. We have no reason to doubt the claims made by some of their customers, search Google for more information.
Government advice for consumers on the Web is given in A Consumer's Guide to E-Payments.
Many hosting companies offer packages that include the building blocks of a complete e-commerce system. They may include templates for the web pages, ready-built forms, and facilities for database, secure connection and online payments. E-commerce packages, unsurprisingly, are typically the most expensive packages on offer.
The way of promoting your site on search engines such as Yahoo and MSN Search has completely changed in the past year or two. In former times (before 2001), search engines would use programs that looked for web pages and searched their HTML for keywords and descriptions of the contents. Some authors abused the system by repeating the same keyword over and over again in an attempt to get their page higher in the listings. In those days, it was usual to get your entry in a search engine's lists for free.
There are still a couple of search engines that use keywords and the like but most search engines now use real people to examine and evaluate your site. There is a charge for this service from a few tens of pounds to a few hundred pounds per year with no guarantee that your site will be listed at all.
Web developers normally offer a maintenance contract for an annual fee. This should include minor changes and additions to text, the placement of new graphics and checking for broken links and fixing them where appropriate. Broken links caused when an external site moves their page from one address to another may be fixed if the owner indicates the new location. Broken links that occur because the page has been removed cannot be fixed.
This section deals with the actual content of websites.
You may let your web design company produce all text, graphics and enter into a maintenance agreement with them. You may want to provide all or some content and let the designers make it into a web page. Your hosting package may have templates that make building a website breeze, if a little constraining on the content you can include. Again it is not a how-to-do-it guide, instead it describes the constituent parts of a web page and introduces some of the issues that should be addressed when setting up a website.
The pages that make up a web site typically consist of text and graphics. The graphics may be photographs or created from scratch using a graphics package. They may be animations, they may be video. Pages may also contain a form for visitors to enter details. Usually the contain links to other web pages, these links are properly called hypertext links.
Whatever the content, the appearance of the page is partly determined by HTML that encloses the text and graphics. HTML stands for "Hyper Text Mark-up Language" and it is used to define those parts of the page that are paragraphs, those that are headings, lists, links, images and anything else that can be included in a web page. For more information and introduction to writing HTML, try the NCSA (at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML.
In well-constructed web pages, a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used to define the way a heading (or a paragraph, or any other element) actually looks.
This page uses CSS throughout, for more examples of CSS at work visit Eric A. Meyers site at CSS-Edge. Internet Explorer 5.5 and above only implements the mandatory parts of the CSS specification, so some of Eric's work will only look its best in browsers which are more fully compliant with the standard, e.g. Mozilla, Netscape 6 and above, Safari, or Konqueror.
The splitting-up of the content (words and pictures) from the presentation (colours and spacing) has allowed HTML to be transformed into XHTML, that comforms to a far more powerful technology called XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language).
Make your text as simple as it can be, but no simpler. People's reluctance to read is increased when viewing a computer screen but don't reduce what you have to say too much. Consider linking to a more specialised site if you need to go into more detail than you intend for your site. A few appropriate graphics can help sighted people to understand your message more easily but use them in addition to your text; for the benefit of your viewers with limited sight do not use graphics not instead of text.
Of course, pages that are predominantly adverts have different requirements from purely informative text, but providing a link you're your snappy ad to fuller descriptions always helps.
In your browser, right-click on any graphic and you will probably find that the filename extension of the image is JPG (or JPEG) or GIF. Both these formats are termed bitmaps and are produced much like a newspaper photograph as a series of coloured dots (pixels). The downside of using bitmaps is that increasing the viewing size of the image just makes the dots bigger, and if taken to extremes the result is an image like those used when trying to disguise people's identity on television.
Using many large graphics files will make your page load slowly. Reducing the number of graphics or reducing the size of the files can improve the loading times greatly. Sensible use of compression when using PNG and JPEG files can often reduce file sizes substantially without a discernable loss of quality. Similarly, GIFs can be optimised. JPEGS are recompressed every time they are saved; if you are having artwork done, it is a good idea to request a copy in TIFF format.
There is no best format; they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Each format commonly used on the web is chosen as a combination of its features and the size of the resulting file.
GIF files are good for block graphics such as logos and most non-photographic work. They can produce quite small files when properly optimised. They are not suitable for photographs or highly detailed work as they have a maximum of 256 colours available. They do have the ability to make areas of the image transparent so that the background of a web page can shine through. Animated GIFs allow simple animations to be produced with a relatively small file size.
JPEG files can reproduce photographs and high detail work extremely well but they use compression to reduce file sizes. The amount of compression can be specified when the file is saved from a graphics package - a high degree of compression will result in a comparatively small file but much detail will be lost, a small amount of compression will retain the detail but the file size may not be that much smaller. A disadvantage of JPEG is that every time a JPEG file is read into a graphics package, altered and saved it will be compressed again and further detail will be lost- it is termed a lossy compression system.
Both of these formats have been the subject of litigation with regard to their patents and came close to being taken out of use by ordinary people through potentially high licensing costs. In response, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) produced the PNG format that can work well with both block graphics like the GIF and GIF detail graphics like the JPEG. The format can produce features that are unavailable to GIFs and JPEGs - the trouble is that old browsers cannot handle them at all and even the latest browsers cannot yet make use of many of the advanced features. From time to time you may come across .bmp files on web pages. These are the format for Microsoft Windows; they are a poor choice for web graphics, as they tend to produce large files with poor visual quality. Nottingham University provides a comparison of GIF, JPEG and PNG
One way of producing graphics has not been mentioned, vector graphics. Drawing programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw, rather than bitmap editing programs like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, generally produces these. Instead of creating the image with coloured dots, these images save the instructions on how to draw the image, for example a vector file if translated into English might read something like this: Draw a vertical line from half way up the screen to three quarters up the screen. Colour it blue. Make it one millimetre thick….
The World Wide Web Consortium has defined the Simple Vector Graphics format (SVG) that uses English-like sentences to define the image. The latest versions of the professional vector graphics products have the ability to save their files in SVG format. Few browsers have the ability to display these images directly, but Adobe, and others, provide a SVG plug-in that is compatible with most browsers. They also have a SVG demo page
Macromedia Flash has had a bit of a poor reputation recently due to web designers producing self-indulgent animations that take ages to load but add nothing of value to the site. Thankfully, the company has asked these designers to think what they are doing and to make intelligent use of Flash. Flash is a useful tool and graphics format that can be used to provide interest to a site without adding greatly to the download time of the web page; it can also be used to create some very worthwhile user interfaces. Macromedia also produce the Shockwave player, the differences between the two are given here.
A less sophisticated, though useful format is the animated GIF, which uses a sequence of GIFs held in a single GIF file. Anything more than a few frames of animation using one of these will create an overly large file.
There are dozens of graphics formats but most are formats used while the designer is creating the image using a graphics packages such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw. When the designer has finished the image, he or she will save it as a GIF or JPEG file for web use, in the native format of the graphics package used and perhaps an additional one in TIFF format for transferring to other packages.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) stepped in to bring some standardisation to the web when it was in danger of becoming unusable. One browser would make use of HTML elements that were ignored by other browsers - even those from the same manufacturer. The W3C examined the usefulness of elements found in the browsers of the time, simplified their usage and defined HTML 3.2 as a compromise between what current browsers could do and what W3C wanted HTML to be. Beginning with version 4.0, browsers began to conform to the web standards and now, with browsers at versions 6 and 7, there is good (but not absolute) conformity. Browsers using the Gecko engine (e.g. Netscape 6 onwards and Mozilla) adhere closely to the standards. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 and above tends to ignore parts of the standard which are not mandatory.
The W3C provide a service whereby anyone can check any page on the web. Their web validation service page asks for the web address of the page to be checked and gives you a report of any errors in the HTML. Authors who have had their page validated successfully may use a “Valid HTML” button [like the one at the bottom of this page] to show that they have taken the care to produce valid HTML. Clicking on the button should show the results of testing the page with the W3C validator.
The Disabilities Act requires that published material is available in formats suitable for people with disabilities; this may mean making sites available in other forms, but many sites can be made accessible to most by following the guidelines of disability aware groups.
Legal requirements regarding the access of information (and pure courtesy) to people with sight deficiencies, limited controlled movement and other disabilities has brought about changes in the way enlightened web developers construct their pages.
Badly constructed pages are often unintelligible to people using speaking browsers, Braille machines and text-only browsers; ill-considered colour schemes can result in illegible text; pages that cannot be navigated efficiently without a mouse can be impossible to use by those with difficulty in making controlled hand movements. A little extra care can make a big difference.
Be careful about your use of graphics, a site that relies on graphics over text to give its message will not be usable by people using a speaking browser. Be careful to add an explanation of the graphic in the description attribute when you link to a graphic file.
Accessible pages need not be dull, simply providing a text-based menu on a page in addition to graphical menus can make a page usable. Anything that allows users to navigate using a keyboard instead of the mouse will usually be acceptable to specialist equipment.
The Web Access Initiative (WAI) has more information on accessibility.
Don't forget about copyright; you cannot copy significant portions of text or images from the web and paste them into your site nor can you take significant parts of paper documents or photographs and use the on your site unless you own the copyright, have a licence to the copyright, or the copyright has expired. For text, art and photographs this is 70 years after the author's death or, if the author is unknown, 70 years after first publication. This includes material on the Internet.
Putting a link to someone else's web page is not a copyright issue and you do not need permission to do so. Including someone else's work via a link on your page such that it appears to be part of your site could very well be a breach of copyright unless the owner's consent is given.
Until a couple of years ago web designers would go out of their way to try to accommodate old machines and browsers, often producing many versions of the same site so that it would look the same in many (but not all) browser versions and on many (but not all) older machines. There were two major considerations - the graphics capabilities of older machines and the use of obsolete browsers.
It used to be common practice for web designers to use a special set of colours that were viewable without compromise on screens that could only display 256 colours. These were known as the web-safe colours. There are very few machines still in use that have this limitation for many years new machines have been set up to 16 million colours. It is safe to ignore the web safe colours unless your audience is likely to have very old computers. Similarly, it is becoming rarer to find a screen using a screen resolution of 640 x 400 or less. Screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or more have been the norm on desktop machines for the last three or four years but do not forget visitors using laptop computers where 800 x 600 is still used in significant numbers.
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