Creating a Village Website

I am not an expert and this is just sharing my experiences in creating a village website which hopefully will help you. You use this entirely at your own risk. I'm not sure what the risks are exactly but where there's blame theres a claim and you arent claiming of off me!

Because of the rapidly changing way of the internet you may well find my experiences are now out of date, so unfortunately you may just have to muddle your way through like I did.

Who This Page Is For
This is for people who want to create a village website for a minimum of cost (preferably none at all) but are prepared to put in a lot of their time learning how to create and maintain a website for their village. Like most things once you now how it is easy. Creating and maintaining is straightforward but it is tedious learning how.

What You Need:
You need a computer running a version of the windows operating system and it has a modem or broadband connection in place for accessing the internet. You dont need to be particularly computer literate, if you can turn your computer on and know how to connect to the internet and are familer with browsing webpages that is a good start. You require a dogged determination to overcome the obstacles and upto date anti virus and firewall software is a must.You can create webpages using windows notepad, you need ftp software for uploading, you need a domain name and a webhost to provide webspace where you upload your webpage files. More about this below..

Beginings

Like most things to do with computers trying to do something new looks complicated and full of gobbledy gook terms you dont understand. Dont be put off ! Creating a website is actually very easy but I think your attitude to computers is fundamental if you are going to succeed, you must have the attitude that your going to work out how this website thingy works. You dont need to be a computer expert or a programmer you just need to know how to create the webpages and upload them to your webspace. The other bits and pieces you can pickup as you go along.

If you have ever created a document with a word processor like Word then you may have noticed it gives the file extension (the bit after the name you gave the file) ".doc". This tells your computer the type of file it is i.e. a document created by word. Similarly webpages when created have to be saved with a name and the file suffix ".htm" or ".html". This tells a computer and particularly a web browser like Explorer (which you view webpages on the internet with) that it is a webpage. The htm or html both stand for 'hyper text markup language' it sounds complicated its not. This is what makes a webpage.

Now I learned how to use html from a tutorial on a website by a man named Joe Burns. It is tedious - but easy. One of the best things I did was learning html because even though I now use a web programme which hides the html I can always go back to look at the html if I get stuck. HTML is not a programming language and you can learn it in 7 days on line by going to Joe Burn's HTML primer. Click Here To Start Learning HTML come back when you have the hang of it. Dont be put off its quite easy.

For easy reference I bought a book on HTML by Elizabeth Castro it just made it easy to refer to when creating webpages without going on line back to Joe Burns each time. Click on the book link to buy it..

Alternatively you can buy dedicated software for making webpages. The top of the range is Dreamweaver by Macromedia, which is quite expensive and there are various other packages from other companies. There may be grant funding available for village websites if so you could build this cost into your application.I dont know much about these package.I use an elderly version of Dreamweaver which I got cheap on Ebay. I have also used a package called Hotmetal which was good and a lot cheaper than Dreamweaver. These do make things a lot easier (at a price) and often have uploading programmes built in and features that will automatically upload pages you have modified on to your web space. However you still have to learn how to use them.

Web Space & Domain Names

Hopefully you can now create webpages but to be a website they need to be on 'the web'. You need someone to provide you with webhosting services, where you upload your new files to. Your website needs a domain name (e.g. www.Doddington-Kent.org.uk) to tell people what to put in there browser address bar to find the site. The domain name is also what you publicise and once you start publicising your domain name it will be a headache if you then decide to change domain name.

Originally the Doddington site was hosted on a free webspace provider (Freeserve) which gave something like 15mb of webspace however, to update the site required using the Freeserve dial up number, it was only local rate calls cost but this soon adds up, and the choice of domain name to choose was limited.

Generally with any 'Free' service on the net seems to come at the price of the provider being able to put adverts which does get irritating and some of the content of the adverts may not be suitable for a village website.

. Because of this and I was getting up to 9mb of webspace with over 100 pages on the Doddington site I changed to a paid hosting with a company called Xsession for hosting the Doddington site. It costs (2005) £50 per year for 25mb and I bought the www.Doddington-Kent.org.uk domain name via them which costs £10 every 2 years, plus I get my own email addresses which I can give out to others in the village if required e.g. a snooker club I could give the email address snooker@doddington_kent.org.uk .

When you create webpages the front page ( the page you see when you put the domain name in the browser address bar) you need to name it 'Index.htm' or 'Index.html' and the browser searches for this page and automatically displays it as your front page. You create links from this page to others in your site.

Once you have the webspace you are given the user id and password to access the webspace. To upload you need a FTP programme most of the bought packages come with one built in but you can get free ones. I used a programme called ws-ftp. Many useful free or shareware programmes are available from sites like Tucows. Shareware is software which you have to pay for after a trial period or you have a 'cut down' version to use and pay for the full version if you want the extra facilities.

Your webhost should give details where to upload files to generally it is a folder called 'Public'. On the FTP programme you need to put in your user ID and password which are supplied by your webhosting people. To upload is easy you go online click on 'connect' with your FTP programme you are usually presented with a screen in two halves. One side is what is on your computer i.e. it needs to be set to the folder on your computer where you have saved your webfiles. The other halve shows the webhosts server (make sure you are in the folder 'public' or where ever they tell you to put your webpages.). You then just select individual files (or the whole lot) on your computer and click to transfer (upload) them to your webhosting space. If you have uploaded correctly then if you put in your domain name in your browser address bar you should be shown the page you gave the name 'Index' which should provide the necessary navigation links to all the other pages in your website.

File Structure

It is easy to start with just a folder with all your webpage files and this rapidly gets confusing as your website grows. It is best at the start to make seperate folders for each subject. E.g. if you do a page for your local snooker club then make a folder called Snookerclub and keep all the related webpages and pictures in it. This makes it much easier later to be able to keep track of relevant files to each webpage and sections within your website. Obviously the links between webpages (hyper links) must take account of this.

Website Navigation

If you have ever browsed the internet and landed on a webpage and couldn't find a link to something basic like contact details, or information you know should be on the website but could not find a link for it, then its because the website navigation (the links to other pages in the website) is badly designed.

Although the file Index.htm is effectively the 'front door' to your webpage as search engines index your site they will offer results in searches related to individual pages. i.e. visitors to your website wont all come through the front door they will be dumped on individual pages by search engines. I use the Index.htm as a link to a contents page which has links to the main sections, Events, History, Clubs, Photos, Location, Forum, etc. Each page has a link back to the main contents page, so no matter which page a visitor arrives at they can get to the main site contents.

Also put yourself in your visitors shoes, they probably know nothing about your village so you need to make all the information clear and easily accesible to the visitor by your navigation links. As a good rule of thumb dont make any page require more than 2-3 clicks on links to get to it. If a visitor does not see what they are looking for in the first few seconds of landing on your webpage they will click the back button on their browser to get the next search result from the search engine.

Publicising Your New Website

You now have a village website for the world to see on the Internet, however just because you have a website people dont know its there and neither do search engines. Nobody but you knows its there.

An obvious way for your village is to put the domain name in your village newsletter at regular intervals then at least locals will know it exists. Getting your site listed by search engines is harder. Initially I went round the main search engines looking for the 'submit website' link. This is tedious and very time consuming and not much seems to happen but it is free and your time has no value (except to you). I did use the free and paid services of http://www.ineedhits.com/ which worked well and they would submit your site to 300 search engines for USD 2.50. Also try browsing the internet for free website submission services.

However note that any time you give an email address on the internet assume you will open the flood gates to spam emails (unsolicited adverts sometimes of a very unsavoury nature). So for website publicising get an email address that if the worst comes to the worst you can just delete, or a least know you can ignore emails to that address and even set your email software to just delete any emails to that address.

Meta Tags and Targeting Search Engine Phrases
These are hidden in the top of the html of each webpage and are not seen by the viewer. It is a facility to help you tell some search engines what the page is about and wether your webpage are relevant to a search word or phrase.

For the keywords meta tag think about what your potential visitors would put into a search engine. Phrases are better than individual words and help catch specific search engine queries related to your webpage. For our snooker club page a relevant phrase would be "snooker clubs in kent" and/or "snooker clubs in Swale" (Swale is our local borough). Because this facility has been abused excessive repetition of individual words is penalised by most search engines so try not to repeat words more than 2 or 3 times. A comma is used to seperate each word and phrase from the next.

Similarly you have a meta tag for description which is often used by the search engine as the few lines under the link to the webpage and is as relevant as the keywords to the search engines and also to the person searching in deciding wether to click the link. Use one or two concise lines that help re-inforce your keywords and phrases e.g. "Snooker club for the village of Doddington in Kent in the borough of Swale" re-mentions relevant words.

Dont forget to put a title for the webpage this is another factor that counts points to search engines as to how relevant your webpage is to a search. I would use as a title the description phrase as it is short and sweet and mentions our important words.

The Text of Your Webpage
Search engines also usually 'read' your webpage looking for the phrases/words that are relevant to the search words/phrase. Try to write the text that reinforces your keyword phrases and description but without overdoing the repetition as search engines will penalise for repeated words/phrases without enough padding text. On a snooker club the top part of the page you would put all the relevant details of where it meets, when it meets, times, subscriptions, contact details etc. It doesnt hurt and will help search rankings if underneath you put another paragraph of 'blurb' for search engines it can be related to the history or background of the subject, basically any excuse to repeat your keywords and phrases (but without over doing it). It must read ok visitors wont take much notice of it as the relevant information for visitors to the page is above it.

Pictures

The bigger the picture the bigger the file size. Most software that comes with digital cameras and scanners has some basic image editing facilities. Basically crop to the part of the pic that is relevant. Reduce the picture dimensions that make it viewable for minimum file size. Jpeg compression helps reduce the file size further. And there are other picture formats. A good trick if you do need a large picture is to do a mini thumbnail of it say 150x150 pixels and use that as a click on link to the bigger pic. This is ideal for picture galleries.

Miscellaneous

Free Hit Counters / Trackers - I have tried several of these and without exception Free hit counters have been a waste of time. Either the service dissappears or they change to a paid service which is expensive.
It is interesting to know how many visitors you have and what words and phrases they used on which search engines to find your website and which page they entered the site. You webhost may provide access to your web log files. These are files that record everything that happens on your site but in incomprehensible form. You can get free logfile software such as Funnel Web Analyser which displays the info in readable form. I use the paid stats service available with my webhost which costs £20 per year (2005). Knowing how people got to your site, from where, and which phrases helps you to tweek your website pages and it's interesting!

Forums & Guestbooks

I use the free services offered by Bravenet but as with all free services have advertising and the pop up adverts are particularly irritating. I intend to learn how to make my own forum/guest book but havent got round to it.

Best of luck with your Village Website !

You might like to visit 'web pages that suck' for some ideas on not what to do!

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