Help me make a useful public Web site

To make a long story short, I may inherit (at least in part) a longtime existing volunteer Web site project. It was previously on a free hosting site, but the host has proven quite unreliable – in fact, it deleted the existing site with no advance warning.

The original developer of the site is willing to pass the backup files along to me, and we are currently discussing some means of hosting the project elsewhere, and perhaps changing/expanding the format somewhat. The previous format was a very extensive bibliography, with some links to additional essays and other text files of various sorts, as well as some blurbs on current developments in the field in question.

I believe quite strongly that this site needs to be preserved, and in a publicly accessible form. (Perhaps even more publicly accessible than it was before; I was mulling over the idea of a discussion forum of some sort.) However, I am a liberal arts person, and although I’m pretty familiar with the subject matter of the site, I don’t have a clue about the technical side of creating a website.

So my questions are:

  1. How difficult is it to create a website? How much will it depend on the functionality we want to incorporate? (I assume a bibliography is one thing, but a discussion forum is quite something else.)
  2. Any recommendations for hosts, preferably ones that are user-friendly for someone who’s never done this before?
  3. How can this be set up so that multiple people can edit it? (The original creator lives on another continent, and is much more computer-savvy than I am.)
  4. What am I in for in terms of upfront and ongoing time commitment? What factors will play into this?

I’m willing to lay out a few bucks upfront for a manual or software or that sort of thing, and my current ISP provides (IIRC) 10 mb of free Web hosting space. Will this be enough? I should probably poke around and see what tools and templates they offer, but it would be better to keep the site in some format which could easily be switched to another spot if I decide to switch ISPs.

What other questions should I be asking? And if you’ve done this kind of thing yourself, please share your experiences.

Making a website is actually pretty simple. Making a really cool interactive database driven site is not. Luckily, it sounds as if you need more of the former.

There are some pretty easy to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors out there. Even some decent free ones.

I am a big Dreamweaver fan, but there’s a pretty steep learning curve there

To answer your questions (Note: IANA Web Developer, but I’ve built some pretty cool sites in my time):

Not very, assuming you’re comfortable with basic HTML and/or get a good (decent) WYSIWYG. A lot will depend on functionality, though. A messageboard is pretty easy, though. I like PhPBB, it’s free and fairly easy to set up and run.

There are lots of free hosts out there, some of them quite decent, but you get what you pay for generally speaking. I’ve been really happy with ipowerweb. They’re reasonably priced, with a pretty easy to use control panel, and they maintain the PhPbb software on the servers, so implementation of the messageboard is very simple. here is an example of a messageboard I just threw up for one of my bands. Took about an hour.

Piece of cake. As long you are both communicating with each other about what you’re doing, both of you can maintain the site independently/jointly. A good FTP client is a must: ws_ftp is great and free for PC users, Fetch is great (although not free) for Mac users.

Depends entirely on the layout and construction of your site. A simple, clean design will go far in making your maintainence quick and painless. Of course, that implies a static site (not database driven). Poke around the web. Look at similar sites, and try to find a clean template to use (google ‘free web template’ for ideas) and go from there.

Good Luck!

P

I’m no web expert, but i’ve written quite a bit of HTML now for online courses at my university, and i have produced some pretty decent-looking and user-friendly pages.

It sounds like most of your website content is text. This means that you might not need very much storage space at all, because on most sites images and other multimedia files take up the vast majority of the storage space. Even a very long bibliography shouldn’t take up more than a coupla hundred kilobytes if you don’t weigh it down with images or fancy animations.

As someone who only fairly recently learned to write web pages. i believe that if you’re going to learn to write webpages yourself, a good place to start is with a basic HTML book, one that teaches you the common coding and how it works. This is where i started, and it actually takes very little time to pick up the basics. HTML might be a little picky, requiring you to have everything in the right place in order to work properly, but it’s also extremely logical. I’m also a liberal arts person and i picked it up pretty quickly using The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating an HTML Web Page and HTML Goodies. There are heaps of other books out there as well, and if you type “html tutorial” into Google you’ll also find that you can learn the basics quite easily online from free sources.

The great thing about starting with HTML itself is that, when you move on to a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver (awesome) or Frontpage (rather crappy, IMO), you can troubleshoot more easily and can manipulate the code to get the results you want.

I can’t give you much advice about hosts, because all the pages that i’ve written so far have been uploaded to the server at my university. I haven’t yet had to deal with outside hosts.

On a final note, i’m a firm believer in keeping important information publicly accessible, so if you want to ask any questions specific to the content and layout of your project, feel free to email me at the address in my profile.

Creating a web site is relatively easy. Designing one is another matter. I can take a month or more to design a site, but spend only a day actually creating it.

The approach I take is design a house for a couple to live in, knowing down the road the couple will create additions for more bedrooms, a family room, yadda, yadda. The hard part of the process is the house when view 30 years later looks as though the entire building was contructed all at once. If you can design a web site in the same manner, you will be ahead of the game.

So why think so far ahead when it’s so easy to just create a few pages and add more when you need them? Most site are built that way. However, if you make some major modifications, they don’t always fit in with the current design. If you purposely plan for major improvements, the amount of work you eventually toss with an ugraded design is minimal. Think today, but always plan for growth.

Tough call. Again, it depends upon your skill levels, the cash for hosting the site and the tools you want built into the site. After all, there is no sense using a host that specializes in Cold Fusion if you have no plans on using it.

Easy answer. The techno-geek uses Dreamweaver MX to build the template from which web pages are constructed. The content providers use Contribute to access the templates, create pages from them and populate with content. The whole she-bang is called a content management system (CMS). Macromedia makes both Dreamweaver and Contribute.

Short on cash for DW? Try 1stPage, a great freeware tool. Whatever you do, avoid FrontPage at all costs.

You can set up a domain name from GoDaddy.com for $8.95 a year, a decent web host with 20 MB of space, email accounts, shopping cart and perhaps 2 GB transfer/month for less than $10.00 a month on an annual basis. So were talking less than $150.00 a year. You can probably find cheaper, but check into the host’s reputation first. Cheaper is often not better.

I administer and oversee some 50 web sites for Uncle Sam, not to mention experience in the corporate arena, academia and still have my fingers in the private pie as well. I’ve been doing this since Netscape 0.9.

Eva - just noticed this. My reply is over on Nads (can’t be arsed to copy it in here!) :wink: