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How to create a website |
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How to create a website |
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A while back we embarked on a campaign to get more sites to tell their story about their journey
to the Freezone. Also to hopefully get them to link to this and/or other prominent Freezone
sites. The reason for this is that we want more people to enjoy the benefits of this subject,
and more sites, with more links will make the Freezone more prominent in search engine results.
At the time of writing, if you go to a major search engine site and use "Scientology" as your search criterion, you will probably get a page full of links about the official Church and also critic sites. There is nothing wrong with such views featuring prominently, but the Freezone has a third view - which is not well supported by the major search engines (unless you are prepared to search through many pages of links, or are cute enough to use other words in your search criteria). Consequently, I am copying to this page some messages sent to the list about this subject in the hope that you too, will put up a web page or two and make links. |
How to create a web site - part 1Hi All, A day or so ago I promised to write up something on how to create a web site. Rather than re-invent the wheel I looked for articles with the help of google. Below you will find a couple of useful links. The first has some good definitions to help clear those awkward words, though the site is a little slow to respond. The second is more readable. For those of you who would like to do this (and I am hoping it is all of you!) I recommend these two as decent places to learn. Link 1 Link 2 |
How to create a web site - part 2Hi guys, Here is some very brief advice about how to get some space on the web etc. (If you haven't cleared some definitions [which should have happened if you read part one and followed the links], then this mail may confuse you. Go back to part 1 of that is the case). There are a bewildering array of providers of either free or very cheap web space. I don't particularly want to plug any of them too much. The one I personally chose was www.portland.co.uk because it has no banners, its free, has some good extra facilities if you want that sort of thing, has been around a while and is not based in the dreaded U.S. with it's trademark culture. Also it has ftp access for uploading rather than doing this through a browser which (so I'm told) is easy for beginners but is a bit of a pain for people who want to maintain a site over time. But those were my criteria. Others may feel differently. Anyhow, you can find a whole bunch of them listed at, for example, http://100best-free-web-space.com There is also the question of where to get a domain name. Well, do you even need one? If you opt for getting a personal page on a service such as geocities then you don't need a domain name. What you get is a page under their domain (e.g. geocities.com/yourname). This is the minimum fuss option. There is some question, however, on how much weight some of the search engines place on these personal pages - probably at least some in most cases. At the other extreme you can register your own domain (e.g. yourname.org) this will cost you a little e.g. http://000domains.com/ or www.directnic.com. Or, particularly if you're UK based, you might consider www.quidnames.com. If you use a service for registering the domain and some other provider for actually doing the hosting then you will have to go through at least some hassle getting the domain transferred over to the people who will actually do the hosting. This will vary from one provider to the next and also possibly on what address you registered (for example, it is different with my provider, depending on whether it is a .org.uk or a .org address). Best to explore the details relevant to your situation when you come to that bridge to cross. Or there is the middle option of getting a sub-domain (e.g. yourname.8bit.co.uk) which should be free (mine was) and is reasonably hassle free. That's all for now |
How to create a web site - part 3Hi All, A little while back I promised to say a bit about how to create a web page. Actually you don't need to know a lot at all as there are editors available which will create an html file for you. As was pointed out a few weeks back, Microsoft word will do this for you, but it creates complex html. A better one to use is Netscape available at http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp and this also gives you a browser, mail etc facilities. Also you could consider Open Office available at http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.1/index.html which will give you a word processor, spreadsheets, presentations and all that for free without having to buy Microsoft's offerings. I've not tried Netscape, but I know that Open Office also writes the html in a way which is quite well laid out, such that if you should wish to look at the html file in a text editor (i.e. look at the program code rather than see what it looks produces on screen), then it is reasonably readable. If you're an old hacker like me you may prefer to create your html file in a text editor such as notepad. In which case there is a comprehensive guide to the html "tags" at http://www.willcam.com/cmat/html/crossname.html There is also the question of what to call your html file. On most servers the main one (the first page a user sees) should be called "index.html". However details may differ from one service provider to the next depending on what software they are running, so pay attention to any instructions you get in this regard. |
How to create a web site - part 4Hi All, More about creating html files. Even if you create your html in an editor, you may like to check the file in a text editor (such as notepad or wordpad available on pretty well all windows PCs) to make sure it has all the essential bits. So this is a very quick intro to html. Here is an example html file, starting with <html> and ending </html> <html> <head> <TITLE>Scientology and the Freezone, a personal view</TITLE> <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="freezone scientology, independent scientology, auditing outside the Church of Scientology"> <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="freezone scientology, independent scientology, freezone, scientology, alternative scientology, auditing, processing"> </head> <body text="black" bgcolor="#77AAFF"> The first paragraph is about me, when I got into Scientology and the auditing and training I've had. <BR><BR> The second paragraph is what I don't like about the CoS. <BR><BR> The third paragraph is about the Freezone and how it differs. <BR><BR> Finally, here are some interesting links: <BR><A HREF="http://www.fzaoint.net">FZAOINT</A> <BR><A HREF="http://www.freescientology.org">Free Scientology</A> <BR><A HREF="myhobby.html">Some more stuff about me on this site</A> <BR><BR> If you have any questions about all this, you can mail me on <BR><A HREF="mailto:somebody@someplace.com">somebody@someplace.com</A> </body> </html> The parts of an html document enclosed in angle brackets are called tags. These give instructions to the browser about what to display and how to do it. The first tag is <html>. This tag, likemost, but not all, have a closing tag </html>. The header of the document is enclosed in the <head> and </head> tags. The header contains the title for the page, a description and some keywords. Even though two of these tags are not displayed and the third only affects the title at the very top of the browser screen, these tags are very important from the point of view of search engines. It is believed that most search engines place a lot of weight on the words they find here. After the header comes the body of the document, enclosed in the <body> and </body> tags. This is where the content of the page goes. Much of it will be text. Please note, however, that browsers take absolutely no notice whatsoever of the way you lay the text out in the file. For example, paragraph breaks in the text are utterly ignored. If you want to have paragraph breaks you either put two <br> tags in succession (br = break or new line) (note there is no </br> tag). Alternatively enclose theparagraph in the paragraph tags <p> and </p> which accomplishes the same thing. Customising the text colours and background: In the example, as part of the body tag, you will see how to specifiy the text and background colour (but note, if you're not american, bgcolor is spelt in the US style without the 'u'). Most browsers recognise simple colour names such as black, white and red. If you want a very specific colour, you can specifiy it numerically. This is done via a 6 digit hexadecimal number starting with the # symbol. (Hexadecimal means that it is using base 16 instead of base 10 like ordinary numbers and the letters a through f are used to represent 10 to 15). The first two digits specify the amount of red, the second the amount of green and finally the third the amount of blue. The example colour of #77AAFF gives a pale blue. You can play with different numbers and seeing what colours they produce for hours - well - I can anyway. If you want a picture as the background, you will need a body tag more like this one: <BODY background="112-1266_img.jpg" bgproperties=fixed text="blue"> The .jpg (or .gif) file needs to be uploaded separately to the server. The 'bgproperties=fixed' means that the background is fixed in position and doesn't scroll with the text on a long page. Leave this out if you want the background to scroll as well. The all important hypertext links have examples above. They are enclosed in the "anchor" tags <a> and </a>. The "href" specifies what to link to and the text appearing after the '>' that finishes the first anchor tag, but before </a> is the text the user will see underlined to click on. Please be sure to include a link to http://www.fzaoint.net The example shows how to do a link off to another site, another page on your own site and how to do a "mailto" link. If you want to know more about how to set the text out nicely, I'm not going to cover it here. Probably it is as easy to do this in your html editor. Alternatively look up tags such as <center>, <table>, <tr>, <td>, <font> in the reference site I mentioned in part 3. |
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