Thing to Know Before You Code, Part One: Tools

If you've been following this series, you should already have an idea of what you want your web site to come out looking like. Now, we're going to cover how to get from a blank page to that concept dancing in your brain. First thing's first, though: what tools do you need to have ready?

Basic Tools:

• HTML Editor
• Graphics Editor

HTML Editor

An HTML Editor is something like a word processor for HTML code. The most basic is Notepad, which comes with just about every Windows operating system installation. Because it is so ubiquitous, it's what I'll base examples on. You can use this Real-Time HTML Editor to copy & paste code samples for an instant view.

If you want to work with something a bit spiffier, check out the below guides:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors

Graphics Editor

The main reason for picking up a graphics editor--as far as this article is concerned--boils down to re-sizing and re-sampling images.

I use PaintShopPro as my main graphic editing utility because I'm a digital painting hobby-ist, and it's powerful, yet still easy to figure out--unlike Adobe's Photoshop. Then again, I think most of Adobe's editing software requires advanced degrees in geek-out to get to even a middling of their usefulness. If your budget isn't that stretchy, there's the free stuff, starting with the Paint program that comes with Windows to Brush Strokes, which I'm told is pretty nifty for the price (free). And there's always the GIMP. It's one of the big Open Source Initiatives.

Where to Put Your Site, Part Two: Hosts

Decades and decades (okay, just *a* decade) ago, hosting a website was expensive. As with all maturing technologies, the cost has come down and you have more choices. If you like the whole techno-geeking stuff, you can pay your local Internet Service Provider for a static IP address, set up a web server on a computer attached to that IP, and host your own. All things considered, this is *not* the service of choice for most small businesses, and rarely needed for most authors. The second choice is to pay someone else to host your website, and let them deal with all the minutiae of keeping the servers ticking.

If you want to go the first route, I am not the best reference for you, though you may find some of the points below interesting. For those paying to host their sites, read on.

What do you need to know about your site host?

How much is it going to cost me?

Depending on where you go, you can pay as little as nadda to upwards of thousands of US dollars. On average, though, the prices for a decent hosting package are settling between the US$3 and US$15 per month mark.

Quick note here - there ain't no such thing as a free site host. If it's not a promo deal, you're paying for the hosting by watching ads, or allowing ads to take up valuable space on your site, and almost always with no control over what gets put in those ad slots.

What should I look for in a hosting package?

This is one of the places where things get more personal. If you plan to podcast from your site, you want more space to store your podcasting files and more monthly bandwidth to serve them. A basic plan that gives you under 100mb of storage and less than 1GB of monthly bandwidth isn't going to be useful. However, if you just plan to send out text-based files, like your web pages, 50mb to 100mb of storage with 1GB bandwidth per month may be more than enough.

To give you the math...
1,000 bytes (b) = 1 kilobyte (kb)
1,000kb = 1 megabyte (mb)
1,000mb = 1 gigabyte (GB)

The average web page file is between 2kb and 3kb and accent pictures average between 5kb-50kb. In a purely vanilla website, assuming each page view requires five images, the html and the style sheet, let's figure each download to average about 80kb per page view. That means a 1GB bandwidth allowance will let your pages be served 12,500 times. If you have a 15 page site, that's about 800 visits per month, or a little over 27 visits per day, which is pretty decent starting out.

If you add podcasting, well, 1GB of monthly bandwidth doesn't cut it. A rule of thumb for mp3s is that each minute of recording is 1mb of file size. A five minute recording then becomes a 5mb file. If you were to just serve that one file, 1GB of bandwidth would let you send it out 200 times per month, or just under 7 times per day. If you're podcasting, though, the likelihood that you'll have only one 5mb file to serve is slim to none. On a low volume site, you would do best to have at least 10GB of monthly bandwidth. That's why there are podcast hosting services like Podio Books or Podcast Alley.

Where are the servers located?

Why does this matter? Well, for one location defines most of the applicable laws. If you plan on hosting topics that could be subject to censorship in a given region, hosting out of that region is asking to have your site shut down. Another point on local laws is what kind of fiscal burden they place on your site host--who passes that down to you. In Texas, for example, one of the Private Investigators associations has successfully lobbied to make computer technicians subject to PI licensing requirements. There's also the matter of supporting your local economy.

What Server Side Scripts do they Serve?

Server-side scripting languages are the types of involved code-behind stuff that make for the truly "dynamic" sites, where the pages are made on the server based on the programmed code. If they support PHP (most do) and MySQL (a free database server platform), then you can usually set up a WordPress blog on your site with a few instructions and maybe a call to their tech support line or two. ASP and ASP.NET are only served from Windows OS servers--it's a Microsoft invention.

Why do you care about this? Later on, when you want to add extra perks (or pay someone to add them), knowing what Server-Side Scripting languages you can program in will help.

Where can I get hosting?

If you're going to go the route of the no-money-out-of-pocket site host, Microsoft's OfficeLive for Small Businesses is actually a pretty good deal. I set up a site at http://shaybee.web.officelive.com/ just to see how it worked. They do offer extras for a fee--like shopping carts--but the basics are good, like setting up the web pages without having to learn a lot of the code-behind-the-pages. In fact, their site builder system is easy enough to use that, with just a little bit of CSS know how, you can create some pretty nifty static sites quickly and easily. And, aside from being so darn easy to use, they serve ads to *you* and not on your web site.

If, however, you want more control over what goes on behind the scenes, or you want to run a blog at "yourdomain.com", you may find paying for a hosting service to be more useful.

I host shaybee.com through Planet Small Business. The admin screens are fairly easy to use, they offer FTP uploads, and setting up sub-domains is pretty easy, in case you want to run blog.yousite.com. At the same time, most of their tech support is via email, even for basic stuff.

Dixiesys.com has also been recommended by a member of the Writing and Publishing Group.

Feel free to add notes about different hosting companies in the comments for this post.

Where to Put Your Site, Part One: Domains

There are two things you pay for when setting up a website: the file server to host the site -- where you store the files that make up your web site -- and the domain. Let's start with the domain.

What *is* a domain?

You've probably already heard or seen someone mention "URL"s. That stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is a fancy way of saying the directions to stuff you want to see on the 'net. URLs are a subset of URIs, which is where you start needing a degree (or matching experience) to keep from getting lost in the techno-speaking. Domains come in three parts: top-level, site, and sub-site domains. The first, top-level domains, are your .coms and .nets and all. The next up, the site domain, is the part that goes yoursitename in yoursitename.com. Sub domains include the www. or blog. or whatever. All together, they look like: sub-domain.site-domain.top-level-domain.

CAUTION: Each site domain is specific to a top level domain (TLD). Yoursite.com is not the same registration as yoursite.net or .org or any of the other TLDs. If you want yoursite.com and .net and .org and any other TLD (or want to prevent someone else from registering variants on "yoursite"), you have to register for each TLD separately. Most brand concious businesses stick to registering the .com, .net, and .org versions of their site.

Where do you get them, and what do they cost?

Something to make clear, you cannot "buy" a domain--you only lease it. The cost depends on who you register through. You can find accredited domain registrars, entities authorized by ICANN (a.k.a. the guys who run the internet) to lease out domains, through InterNIC. A number of site hosts will also provide domain registration services, though these are usually through reseller agreements. All in all, expect to pay from US$8 to US$15 per year to lease a domain under the .com, .net, and .org TLDs.

You can register your domain lease separate from your hosting service, or you can pick a package. For the most part (i.e. read the fine print on any package deals), your domain registration is separate from your site hosting service.

CAUTION: There's a recent move toward "proxy registrations". One of the pushes for it is that the information you provide when registering for a domain is posted to the WHOIS database as required by existing laws, which privacy advocates find a cause for concern. With a proxy registration, a proxy company registers the domain and sub-leases it to you. I do *not* recommend proxy registrations.

What style of domain do do you want?

AuthorsFullName.com is a pretty popular site domain format - there's laurellkhamilton.org and stephenking.com and ericflint.net and davidweber.net and ... well, a lot more. Sometimes, though, something in our stories will suggest itself. Patricia Brigg's hurog.com is a fair example of that. Piers Anthony, on the other hand, went for the friendly hipiers.com, and let's not leave out our best selling author, John Foxjohn at johnfoxjohnhome.com.

What you decide is ultimately up to you. Have fun with it. =)

Planning Your Website, Part Three: Graphics

Continuing from the last article ...

Graphics

The genre you write in has some say in what graphics you pick. Hearts and flowers and fanciful flourishes abound for romance writers, while tombstones and dripping blood play well into horror. Since you're marketing *your* writing, think of the things that might end up on your book covers. Published authors might be able to get permissions from the copyright holders to use modifications of their book covers as site elements. If you are not the creator of your artwork, you are going to have to concern yourself with the copyrights covering the graphics you choose.

But, as part of your site design, what graphics are you probably going to be looking for? Please note: this is a separate issue from "content" pictures, which could include your book covers or any other pictures posted as part of the reading experience on your site.

Header

The header is the banner at the top of your web page that identifies your site. You may choose to have one header for the entire site or a different one for each section. If you do choose different headers, remember to keep them in "theme" - carry over consistent elements through out the graphics.

Navigation Buttons

These "graphics" don't have to be graphics at all, but if you want something fancier than plain colors, you're probably looking at button pictures. The nice thing is they are easy to build. Try the Buttonator and see for yourself, or use a graphics editing program to build them--these will be covered in a separate post on "Basic Tools for Web Building".

Accent Pieces

Rather like the little touches around your home, accent pieces are all those "minor" flourishes that round out your site presentation. These are the horizontal rules, the bullet points for your lists, attention buttons, and the like. To get a better idea of all that can be considered an accent piece, head on over to the css Zen Garden and flip through the designs there.

Oh, and a nifty thing to note: all those gorgeous designs on the css Zen Garden are accomplished by changing the css file--the cascading style sheet. The actual html--where all the content is stored--is the same through out all the designs.

So, now you've got an idea of what you want your site to look like, it's time to decide *where* to put your site.

Planning Your Website, Part Two: Design Factors

If you read the last article, you should have also gone through this tutorial from Xavier University of Louisiana, about planning your web site. At this point, you should have the content for your site outlined, so this article will expand on the factors that influence design choices.

Back in the first article, I stressed deciding what "message" you want to present. Keep that message in mind while you weigh your choices for page layout, site colors, fonts and graphics--the look of your site.

Page Layout

There are lots of ways to fancy it up, but, in the end, there are only so many ways to arrange your site. The below graphic points out some of the standards:

If you want to get a look at how these can be used, click on over to Open Source Web Design (OSWD). This is also a good place to get templates, but watch the license agreements--some of them are "non commercial use only".

Colors

The colors you choose for your site say a lot. I recommend taking a tour of Claudia Cortes' Color In Motion flash film to get an idea of what associations different colors carry.

Also, while you were over as OSWD, did you notice that most of the sites have a limited color palette? Some good rules of thumb on color schemes are:

• At most, only use three colors for background: one for your header, one to put text on and one to look fancy off to the sides
• Make sure your font colors have a high contrast with your background colors. Examples: black and white, violet and cream, burgundy and blush
• Pick up to four text colors: body text, visited link text, unvisited link text, and heading text.
  
• Use complementary colors for your headings and your body text. Using a different color helps set off the headings, but you don't want to lose readability.
  
• Use mildly contrasting colors for your link texts and your body text.
  

Fonts

Fontography on the web sucks. No matter how many fonts are available for print, there's a bare handful that you can count on being installed on your viewer's computer. If the font isn't on their computer, then whatever they set as the default for that font family comes through. All in all, that means your best bet is working with that bare handful of fonts, or just specifying the font families.

This post is getting long and the graphics are probably going to take as long, so that'll be the next article.

Planning Your Website, Part One: Concept

Just as planning your book helps to get it written, planning your site helps to get it--and you--published. This is not a step that you can skip. Even if you pay a professional to code your site, you still need to know what you want to put out for all the world to see. Because this is such a big deal, I'm breaking this up into a few posts. We're starting with the concept, and below are some questions to help you define what your web site is going to be.

• Rolling back to the first post, what did you decide your web presence message is?
• Who is in your audience?
  
• For your readers, identify genre, age range, gender, politics, religion, affluence, any special nitches
  
• Do you have books ready to sell to
• publishers?
• readers?
• Are you published? Where?
• How often are you going to update the site? Honestly?
• How comfortable are you with HTML and CSS?
  
• Are there any "added value" features you could add?
  

Now that you have some idea of what you want on the site, go read this tutorial from Xavier University of Louisiana.

Next article: Design deets!

What a Web Page Does

There is a lot of hype about how every professional entity needs a web site, but, when you aren't a marketing guru, getting to the reason behind the clamoring can be confusing. What it boils down to is that web sites can do a lot of the same marketing activities in cyberspace for far less than it costs to do in print: bill boards, press releases, product demos, newsletters, opt-in mailing lists, Question & Answer guides.... The list is huge, and it can seem intimidating at first glance. DON'T PANIC. Not every web site *needs* to do all these things.

Let's take this page by page.

Every web site has a home page. This is the page you land on when you type the site's URL in the address bar and click your browser's "Go" button. "Above the fold" is cross-over jargon from journalism. That phrase refers to the portion of the page your viewers see as soon as the page loads. "Above the fold" on the home page is the single most important part of any web site. Viewers browsing through decide how relevant a site is to them based on what they see in that first glimpse. Think of this part as your bill board.

Next up are section pages. These are mini-home pages for each topic you cover in your site. Common section titles for author web sites include: Bibliography, News, Contact, and Appearances. Some authors provide "added value" sections, such as a blog related to the topic they write on (mystery writers keeping track of forensic advances, for example). Your bibliography is your book list. News sections are usually blog-style roll outs of the latest on dit regarding your writing--the status of books in the pipeline, the updates to release dates, new appearances scheduled, etc. Contact sections can be as small as an "email me" form or they can have the F.A.Q.s (Frequently Asked Questions) and the publisher's address, too.

Under the section pages come the content pages. These are where you get down to the nitty-gritties. Take, for instance, a content page in your bibliography. The bibliography section page should have links to all the things you wrote that you're trying to sell. Those links go to content pages that provide more information on the particular piece, possibly even samples of the writing and a "click to buy" button.

So, that's the flow of a web site with the overview of what the different pages do. Next article up is going to cover planning out your site.

First post: When to Build

Welcome to my new blog, inspired by questions raised on the Writing and Publishing email group. It seems there's a lot of confusion about web pages and making them and--even more important--making them work for you. This blog is going to focus on addressing those issues for the benefit of authors. If you're reading this blog, I'm working from the point of view that you already know *why* you want a web site: exposure. As a general rule, people don't buy what they don't know is out there.

So, to begin, let's start with the next big question: *when* do you need a web page?

I take the stance that the sooner you develop your "web presence" the better. This doesn't necessarily mean shelling out cash for electronic real estate, though. A web presence means how much you come up on a search engine's response, or how much 'net cred you get on the groups and forums you belong to. It's how active a member of the internet community you make yourself. Most important, though, your web presence is the message you take into cyberspace.

What does that mean, the "message you take into cyberspace"? The internet is a growing extension of our local communities. Just as your clothes and your body language and what you say tell people you see face-to-face who you are, the text you type and the videos and sound files you share give your fellow netizens insight into your personality and just how polished and professional you are. Before deciding when to set up your customwebsite.com, decide what message you want to communicate. Are you a hard-hitter or laid back? Are you a details person or is the big picture more your style? Are you publishing for the money, the glamor, or the crazy need to get these damn stories out of your gourd?

Once you know what image you want to present, it's time to look at the next factor in deciding your publicity plan timing points: How much self promotion do you need to do? If you're still writing your first submission, don't sweat the web site. If you have that first manuscript in hand and you're sending out query letters, definitely get set up on MySpace, and think about the web site. If you've just signed your first contract, that web site is knocking on your door. If your first book is in stores, yoursite.com is clearing its throat beside you. Self-published authors and authors with multiple books in store who lack a web site are missing a key component of their marketing strategy.

The next post will be on what a web site does.