Website advice needed

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be looking for someone to design a website for me. Before I start calling around and getting rates though, I’d like to have an idea of what I will actually need, and hopefully sound somewhat knowledgeable when I start asking around.

Aside from some very basic HTML and Java that I taught myself a few years ago, I know pretty much nothing about web design or the new technologies. I am planning on starting a small online entertainment magazine - nothing fancy or important, but it will be rather dynamic, and updated as often as once or twice a day with articles, columns and photos. I would like something that would be easy enough for me to update on my own. I can handle such menial tasks as FTPing files to a directory, etc. but I don’t know how realistic that is in a decent-quality, constantly updated website.

I guess my questions are:

What technologies do I need to support a dynamic website?
What are the standard options in uploading new content to such a website?
How would I determine how much storage space I would need for a site that is mostly text and photographs?
Is there some rule of thumb for determing bandwidth requirements?

And any other hints, advice, recommendations that anyone might have!

Thanks.

2

I built this ugly website myself, from scratch.

Version Zero dates from 1998, and was composed on Notepad, the MS proto-word editor. The current versions of Word and Word Perfect will now save files as *.htm, the standard hyper-text formatted file.

Elizabeth DeCastro has a great primer on building web-pages from scratch: look her up. I taught myself basic HTML and web design after reading her HTML book. The entire process took about a month or so.

Any decent Internet Service Provider (ISP) can set you up nicely with a website. You’ll need a File Transfer Protocol(FTP) application. Google “Free FTP” and you’ll get lots of freeware. The standard software kit that you get from your ISP may also contain an FTP suite.

If you want to get scary with your designs, use Dream Weaver or Cold Fusion. However, my advice is to keep the thing simple.

3

It sounds like what you want is some sort of content management software (CMS). The idea is you have a template for the site. The content is pulled from a database and inserted into the template. There are back-end password protected management pages which allow you to easily upload images and create your articles by dropping text into a form and hitting “submit”. It is a nice way to go because you don’t need to jumble your articles up between html tags. You just write them out in your favourite word processor, copy the text, paste into the CMS and submit. Easy peasy.

The company I work for has several sites like this. Once the site is set up we can give other users access to maintain the site without any technical understanding of how it all works. They don’t need to know even basic html or need anything more than a web browser to update the site.

Q: What technologies do I need to support a dynamic website?

You’ll be using PHP or Microsofts ASP. Both do an equal job in much the same way when it comes to inserting elements into a page. I prefer PHP but I’ll work with both without complaint.

The database pulls will commonly come from MySQL or MSSQL (as well as such things as MS Access). I’ve set up smaller sites that don’t use a database at all but pull the information from a flat text file. This isn’t something you’d want to do for a large heavy traffic site, but for a small personal site it works just fine.

Q: What are the standard options in uploading new content to such a website?

Like I said above, if you end up with a browser based CMS, you’ll be using http to upload images and forms to insert your text into the articles.

Q: How would I determine how much storage space I would need for a site that is mostly text and photographs?

This is a hard call. It really depends on how the site is set up. My little flat file website uses less than if I decided to insert the handful of data in MSSQL or Access.

Lets say you have 50 articles, each with an image or two. The text of the articles are kept in a SQL database. I think you would see your storage well under 200MB. If you’re looking for a host and wondering about what size of an account to get, I’d start with 500mb or so. Storage is cheap these days. Might as well have plenty of wiggle room.

I have a website which has 50+ pages. The thing is littered with graphics and text. If I add up the entire weight of the site without the mp3 and mpeg files it’s only about 2-4mb for the text and graphics.

Q: Is there some rule of thumb for determing bandwidth requirements?

None I’ve been able to use. You never know what’s going to happen day to day. I had a page of mine linked to from slashdot and I saw huge amounts of pull from my server that lasted several weeks. This resulted in the page being linked from other pages which maintained an overall increase in traffic.

One of my current sites decided to give away a free item as incentive to have people sign up for email newsletters (not my idea and I was against it from day one). The site was fairly slow until a ton of “freecrap.com” websites started linking to is. 10,000 signups in 10 days. Tons of traffic.

My music related website transfers about 10 gig of data a month. The flip side of that is my personal page that gets next to no hits every month. Data transfer is about 1 mb a week (snif, nobody loves me)

Back to a formula, you can’t really add the data weight of the entire site and factor in estimated visitors (IE: the entire site is 1mb which means 10 visitors equals 10 mb of transfer). Most of the navigational images on the site will only be downloaded once on the first page and pulled from the browser cache on the next pages the visitor reads. Also, not every visitor is going to look at every page.

If you are doing no marketing on the site you can, in most cases, expect the traffic to ease up a little at a time. When you pick a web host make sure to find out how they bill for extra bandwidth. If you have 1 gig of transfer a month and go over are they going to shut the site off or bill you extra? If they bill extra what rate are they billing? Find out because some “cheap” hosts nail you hard for overages.

4

Thanks, Seven, that’s exactly what I was looking for! Are there particular CMS packages you would recommend? Looking on Wiki, it looks like there’s a decent array of free opensource options, which, considering my budget, is definitely the way to go for me.

5

I’ve used several pre-built and several custom ones. At the end of the day they are all about the same. It’s hard for me to say unless I know more about your project and the level of “geek-a-tude” you want to spend on the site.

What I would do is plot out what the site needs to start with and factor in possible changes to site content and layout.

You say it is going to be an entertainment magazine. Without knowing more lets say you’ll have 3-4 main sections - television, radio, music, print (or whatever). Each of those sections will have articles.

Lets say in a few months you decide you want to dump the radio section and add movies. How hard is this in the CMS software? Will the software allow you to archive the old radio articles without keeping the main radio section active? Some don’t. Some force you to move the articles into an archive section before getting rid of the main “radio” section. This isn’t much of a hassle if you’re only looking at 10 articles. It’s a major pain in the ass if you’re looking at a years worth.

How about archiving off older articles? how does the CMS handle this? You’ll want to keep content fresh but you might also want to give visitors access to the older content. Something to keep in mind.

Another thing to look at is if the CMS allows you to back up your data from the back end. Some do, some don’t. Some just figure you’ll be making back up’s of the database and download your entire site with the settings via FTP. There are always options for doing site backups but think about moving to another web host. How easy is that going to be?

Check out hotscripts.com. They have a bunch of different CMS scripts that all do different things in different ways. Many of the scripts have running demos on the authors website to play with. Also, check out blog type software. Many of those allow for different sections as well. With a little tweaking in the template layout a blog engine would work fine for a magazine site.

If you find something interesting and want me to have a look and give you my thoughts, I’d be more than happy. Email me at 7 (at) tictokmen.com and give me the URL of the script and I’ll let you know if I see something that might be a weakness in its design.

6

Just wanted to thank you again for your input. Based on what you said, I’ve done a fair amount of poking around and looking at the various packages out there and I’ve settled on either Mambo, or Joomla, which are currently nearly identical but now apparently on different development tracks. I’ve even found a local host that seems to meet all the Joomla requirements (based on a website I found using Joomla as its CMS and this host to host it), tried out the online demos, and found it to be exactly what I am looking for in terms of learning curve, functionality and adaptability. Even better, I can apparently install it on my local machine to test it out locally, which I plan on doing as soon as my DSL is back up (man, I’d forgotten how badly dialup sucks!)

ANyway, just wanted to thank you again for your extremely helpful input.

7

Apparenly Mambo is full of security holes. I have seen several people say stay away from it. Joomla is apparently much better in that regard. OTOH, I have seen several people recommend e107 as an excellent CMS. The really good part is the cost. It is free. I don’t use a CMS myself, since what websites I do are very static and don’t need that kind of power.