Do you need a domain name? (www.myname.com)
If you own a business or plan to do business of any sort with your website, you will want to purchase and use a domain name. If you are in business on the web you will need an identifiable domain name that you can take with you from one host to the next as your web hosting needs change. You should use .com for your domain name suffix unless you are a club, charity or major network. Domain names are relatively cheap to own at an average of $35/year (Instantfame charges $17/year). Having your own personal web address might have other advantages later on as the ability to get your favorite names decreases.

Before we move on to website building software, lets take a quick look at how the World Wide Web operates. The World Wide Web is the second most popular part of the Internet. Email is the most popular, recognized, and used feature of the Internet. All Internet traffic flows through phone service lines and is made possible by a 'worldwide' network of computers called servers. Websites consist of folders and files just like the folders and documents on your PC. The file extension for a web document is .htm or .html (hyper text markup or hyper text markup language). Either extension identifies your file as a web document. When you click on a web link (also known as a URL or Uniform Resource Locator) in an email or on a web page, your computer sends a message through your ISP to ‘lookup’ the IP (Internet Protocol) number of that URL. All web addresses are assigned IP numbers by the website host that store them. As an example, our domain name instantfame.com has been assigned the IP number of 216.188.61.170. The URL request first travels to a DNS server (Domain Name Server), which has a list of the domain names of every website in the world and their corresponding IP numbers. The DNS server forwards the request to the actual physical location of our web server. After the request arrives at the web server for that particular website the extended parts of the URL tells the web server the exact path to that file.

As an example, http://www.instantfame.com/support/index.html tells the server to go to the instantfame.com web folder and look in the subfolder called support, find the file index.html and send that file back to your web browser for viewing.

Building your website
Now that you know what you want to accomplish with your website and where and how you're going to host it (Instantfame, of course), you’ll need to get on with building the actual website.

Software for website building
There are a couple of free software packages that are available. One comes with your Netscape browser. It is called ‘Composer’ and is located in Netscape by clicking on ‘communicator’ in the tool bar and then selecting ‘composer’. The other was bundled with earlier versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and or Windows 98 (not the SE version). Microsoft recently stopped bundling this version of FrontPage Express with Internet Explorer. Many times FrontPage Express is installed by default with either of these programs. You can see if you already have it installed by going to programs/accessories/internet tools. If you don’t have FrontPage Express already installed and you have the first version of Windows 98, you may be able to install it by going to ‘add remove programs’ in the control panel and selecting ‘windows setup’ and then ‘internet tools’ and see if it is available to install. You may need your original Windows 98 CD to finish the install.

Instantfame provides a free web page building tool, called WebMaker. With WebMaker you can quickly create a professional looking website in four easy steps. No programming background needed; just add your text and your images to complete the web page template

One of the top commercial software for website construction and maintenance is Microsoft's FrontPage http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/ . The commercial version of FrontPage costs about $129. Another very popular web authoring software package is Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. The URL for Dreamweaver is http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/ The cost of Dreamweaver is about $300. There are other very capable website authoring programs available for less then $100. Try a web search for 'web hosting software' or visit your computer software store and check prices and features on the side of the box. If you own Microsoft office 97 or 2000, some of the included programs will also make web pages. MS Publisher in Office 97 and both Publisher and Word in Office 2000 and higher are capable of making decent looking web pages.

FrontPage offers a complete website authoring and maintenance package that contains many interactive features like page hit counters, search forms, discussion forums and many built in JavaScript actions. If you want to take advantage of all that FrontPage has to offer you’ll need to host your site on a website server that supports FrontPage (Instantfame can support Frontpage extensions upon your request).

Building your website
Almost all of the software used today to develop a website uses a WYSIWYG user interface (What You See Is What You Get). This means that they operate much like a word processing program and hide the actual HTML code from you unless you actually choose to look at the code. This is very handy for folks that don’t have the time or inclination to learn to write hypertext markup language code (HTML). You can type and format text and insert photos and other objects using drag and drop and insert commands from the program's toolbar..

The actual page layout of your website, depending on your artistic skills, may be one of your biggest challenges. You will want to pre-visualize what you want your pages to look like. You'll want to know in advance where every picture and the supporting text will fit on your page. If you are artistically challenged, do some web surfing and when you find a page you like copy as many of the design elements as you like. By design elements I mean the basic layout concept of the page. Do not 'borrow' their actual graphics unless you want to risk copyright problems. Having said that, many web designers will download small graphic enhancements from different sites and use them on their own sites.

Name your home page file index.html. All servers look for a page named index, by default, when opening a basic web URL like www.instantfame.com . You always want the viewer of your page to land on your home page first.

Give your home page a recognizable title. The title will be displayed in the top field of the web browser when the page opens up.

If you are serious about having search engines find your site, you will want to use 'keyword' meta tags. Tags are just a name for html language instructions that give information or instructions to either the browser, the server or in this case, search engine robots. The keywords you supply in these tags along with your page title and the text content of that page are what most search engines are going to look at when they quantify and rate your page. As an example, if your page title, keywords and the text in your page all have the words 'nature photography', your site will rate well with most search engines and your site should come up in the listings in a search for 'nature photography'. Check your web building software's help file or manual to find out how to insert meta keyword and title tags.

Here's an example of what instantfame's meta tags look like:
<meta name="keywords" content="hosting,hosting service,web site,website,website hosting,virtual hosting,e-commerce">

Publishing or uploading your files to your website
After you have completed your website pages you will need to ‘upload’ the files and folders to your website server. The most common method for uploading files on the Internet is called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Websites designed with Microsoft FrontPage and hosted with a FrontPage enabled server use a very easy feature within the program called 'publish' to upload files. If you need to upload using FTP, you will need to have FTP software.

To download an FTP program for your PC or MAC, try our FTP software page . There are other popular choices available, so look around. Most of these programs use a Windows Explorer type graphical interface and it is usually very easy to figure out how to connect to your website server and upload your files. You upload your files much like moving them from one folder to another on your PC. After your upload is complete you can access your new website with your web browser using your new website URL.


Glossary of Terminology

1.  HTML:  hyper text markup language. An ASCII text markup software language code that is used to write web page content.
2.  WEB SITE:  HTML files arranged in folders on a web server.
3.  WEB PAGE:  One single html file representing one page of information within a website.
4.  URL:  Uniform resource locator. Commonly known as a web address http://www.instantfame.com. The term URL can also be used to denote other protocols such as ftp. ftp://www.instantfame.com
5.  ISP:  Internet service provider. A company that provides Internet access.
6.  Website host:  A company that hosts websites on their group of web servers.
7.  FTP:  An Internet protocol used to upload or download files from one location to another.
8.  Domain Name:  www.myname.com. A chosen name applied to a single web address. Can also be .net, .org, .edu. and many others. The number of domain name suffixes is growing rapidly.
9.  IP address:  216.188.61.170. A group of period delineated numbers assigned to all domain names, and many other internet connections.
10. DNS:  A server in the Internet architecture that has a list of every domain name in the world and it's corresponding IP number. DNS servers are the true 'routers' of all Internet traffic.