Words of Wisdom/Warning on Starting a Web Site?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am not going to be able to write another book for at least four years–I am going back to school nights to get my master’s, am working nine-to-five, and am spending a lot of time looking after my mother. Even I can’t do all that and write a book, though I hope to start up again when things eventually calm down.

Soooo . . . I was thinking about starting a web site containing (eventually) hundreds of mini-bios of film performers (one paragraph) accompanied by one photo. Starting with the earliest years of films and going through at least the 1940s. I have scads of copyright-free photos, from old books and magazines.

I have not the slightest idea how to do this: how to buy the space, what kind; I’d have to hire a designer, as I can supply text and images, but not the scanning and downloading. I had someone design my tiny book-plugging site, but she’s not up to anything larger. It would entail constant updating, as I added more and more bios over time.

Any suggestions? Advice? Dire warnings?

2

Can you get yourself a nice nerdy toy-boy to help? I’d offer to do that service but am far away in California. There are lots of style rules about web pages, but with your advanced esthetic taste they will be of little use to you. What computer will you use to develop the web pages on? That may help experts to help you. I had good experience using Dream Weaver and Fireworks for web page building, but that was 5 odd (very Odd) years ago, and software changes so fast.

3

The who in the what with the where, now?

All I have is my little laptop: no scanner, no nuthin’. I’d have to give the photos (most of them in ancient books or fan mags) and the text (which I could e-mail) to a designer and have him/her suggest the most efficient and nice-looking page designs and links. I’d pay, of course–I learned early that when people do stuff for free as a favor, you can’tsayu, “ummm, I asked for those typos to be corrected a month ago.”

4

From my experience, web design can be simply done in Notepad if you don’t want anything too fancy.
If you’ve ever looked at mine, it was all done with straight HTML in Notepad with one or two JAVA scripts cut and pasted in there.

The book that got me started was “HTML Goodies” by Joe Burns.
He has a great website, too: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/

My web server is from Directnic.com
$15 for 1 year for the www.whatever.whosit (and it must hold a lot, because I have a lot of crap on there :wink: )
$15 for the hosting

I think you can have pics scanned to disc at photo developing places, or maybe a copy shop? I’m not too sure about that.

Of course, all of this is if you’re even looking to do it yourself. :slight_smile:

5

Dangit, hamsters ate my post.

As I was saying…

If I understand you correctly, you’re going to develop hundreds of little chunks of information, with associated images, and want to put that up online. You can do that in a text editor, but IMO you’re asking for trouble. If you want to be able to easily edit a single item, or link between them based on attributes (like putting all of the silver screen folks in a set together, and all of the women, and the like), then you’re working your way up to a content management system.

There are a number of options. Assuming you don’t want to drop thousands on something, there are some free/open source options (disclaimer: I have not yet used any of them) you may want to consider. Check out the list of products at cmswatch.com for some options.

You could use some form of wiki as well. Wikipedia is one good example of the power of wiki. Wikis are collaborative web projects – not that you want to collaborate, but I think you can simply not allow others to modify your site. For more on wikis, check out the World Wide Wiki page.

Of course, this is much more than you want to have to deal with as the creator, but if you’re wanting to do this right, you’re going to need to either deal with it or find someone else to do so – and, not intending to offend harmless, you need to make sure you’re dealing with someone who understands the complexity of what you’re trying to do.

Care to guess what I do for a living? :slight_smile:

6

Heck, I bypassed all the tech stiff and just went and bought one.

Yeah, mine’s a MB set up, but I’m sure there are other formats ready made out there.

Good luck, btw, on the scool stuff.

7

Hey Eve!

As a student in college right now studying Computer Science (specifically, CS in web applications), this sounds like something I could definitely help you with, if you don’t mind working with someone just down the coast. If you want to do it yourself and have some questions about setting up such a system (I agree with the sentiment that you should base it on some kind of database – for something like this, it sounds like some MySQL would do the job) or are looking at options for buying something outright, let me know and I’ll be glad to help you out. Hell, I wouldn’t mind even building something like this for you, myself.

e-mail in profile. :smiley:

8

I’m not the pro; no offense at all! :wink:
Thought she might just want to try out the really simple stuff.
I’m just rather pleased with what I was able to do from a $20 book and notepad. :slight_smile:
I’ve tried to use the HTML programs like Dreamweaver and Frontpage but I would get frustrated trying to fine-tune with them.
I would love to do it as a profession if I could ever get into school.

9

Remember, I am pushing fifty: all this stuff is Greek to me. I have e-mailed the owner of this site to ask his advice, as this is the kind of set-up I’d like: an opening page, and links to names you’d access in a “table of contents” like option. Each name would link to a small photo and paragraph-sized bio (there would eventually be hundreds of them).

I think my best bet would be to hand this off to someone who knows what the hell he/she is doing. Every few months, I would supply an update of new photos and text to be added.

Maybe I could have banner ads on it (not pop-ups!) to defray the costs?

10

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about—each bio accompanied by a photo. Think there’s a place for this?

Art Acord (1890–1931) Cowboy actor of the 1910s and ’20s, whose career faded with the coming of sound. Never as big a star as Tom Mix or William S. Hart, rodeo star Acord entered films in 1911 and found success by 1915, playing the character Buck Parvin in several comic western shorts. After serving in World War I, he worked steadily through the 1920s, mostly in westerns such as Winners of the West (1921), The Oregon Trail (1923), Rustlers’ Ranch (1926) and Spurs and Saddles (1927). His last major role was as The Arizona Kid (1929); Acord made only one talkie, Trailing Trouble (1930), before killing himself (with cyanide) in Mexico at the age of 40. About 20 of his films are thought to have survived, but mostly in private hands.

Renée Adorée (1898–1933) Lovely, flower-like French-born romantic lead of the 1920s. A minor stage actress in Europe, Adorée entered American films in 1918 and struggled for years before achieving stardom opposite John Gilbert in King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), as a French peasant girl in World War I. She made an average of three films a year through the 1920s: most notably as Musette in La Boheme (1926), opposite Lon Chaney in Mr. Wu (1927), with Gilbert again in The Cossacks (1928). When talkies arrived, Adorée made a good showing in The Pagan (with Ramon Novarro, 1929), Redemption (with Gilbert, 1930) and Call of the Flesh (Novarro again, 1930), before being sidelined by the tuberculosis that would kill her at the age of 34.

May Allison (1890–1989) Pert blonde leading lady of the 1910s and ’20s, married to Photoplay editor James Quirk (from 1926 till his death in 1933). Allison made her film debut with a bang as a clean-cut modern woman in Theda Bara’s A Fool There Was (1915), and filmed steadily till her swan song in 1927, The Telephone Girl. Never a major star, she nonetheless played leads in such long-forgotten silent comedies and dramas as Social Hypocrites (1918), Peggy Does Her Darndest (1919),
Are All Men Alike? (1920), Flapper Wives (1924) and Wreckage (1925)—an impressive total of nearly 60 films in a little over ten years. Allison specialized in modern, adventurous, romantic characters, much like her own personality. A wealthy society hostess after her retirement, she lived to be 98.

11

Eve, as long as you’re going to be giving away the information, why not let someone else handle the computer needs? I second Braniac’s suggestion; post your biographies and pictures in Wikipedia.

12

No, I’d prefer to have it under my own domain, my own little kingdom, where I could control the look, the content, the links. I’ve been searching around and have found several sites with the same idea, but not very comprehensive. I’d like mine to eventually be the imdb of movie-star “snapshot bios,” with well over a thousand entries.

13

Eve, I’m confused. You already have a website, why not make the bios an extension off of that site? If not, pick out a name, go to some place like Ventures Online, etc and register it. Step numero uno. Then get the web-designer involved.

14

To allay some of your fears. I went from being a web newbie like you to designing, building and maintaining a website for a non-profit organization in a fairly short time. With the tools and technology available today, it is a fairly easy and fun project. But, it is terrifyingly daunting when you first start out, as you are doing now. Trust me, it is a good idea so go with it! The website isn’t the problem, just getting accurate content to put up there!

15

This sounds like something that could be completely automated, if you wanted it to be. Find someone who can program in PHP or Perl and design some kind of template for the pages. I might be able to do something like this - I’ve never tried it before, but I’ve seen a webpage that was automatically generated in a situation like this. Whenever the guy who’s page it was wanted to add something, he just put the text file or picture in his web directory and it was added to the list of links the next time someone viewed the page.

It would be low maintenance for you if this could be made to work. Put text files here, name them like this, put images here, name them like this. You wouldn’t have to pay someone to keep the page up for you - just to write the scripts in the first place.

16

Eve, feel free to email me. I could set you up with the layout and a control panel for you to upload the photos and text, which would all be formatted automatically.

17

I have only one piece of advice, which is: do not, repeat not, put any e-mail address on the website that you do not care to be inundated with spam.

I learned this the hard way.

Also, if you register a domain, use a PO Box as the address, not your home address, or anyone who does a whois on your domain can find out what your home address (and sometimes telephone number) are.

18

Eve, I’m happy you have your priorities straight and are including cause of death. It’s something most people like us want to know.

19

I don’t know if that’s doable. I have five tiny pages rented from some Network company; what I’d need a is huge site with hundreds of linkable images.

That sounds my best bet—though I think I should tsalk to a designer first, so they could recommend where and what I should buy.

But wouldn’t I need hugely expensive equipment, and a lot more technical expertise than I have? Sounds cheaper to hire a designer.

Point noted, thanks! I could use my work address for billing.

20

From what you’ve described, Eve, it sounds like a simple database-driven collection of information and images would be your best bet. That would allow for maximum flexibility in adding, removing, and changing information on-the-fly. Such a thing would be a snap to set up in PHP using SQL, as well as authoring a control panel for you to upload or have someone do it for you.

I’ll re-iterate my earlier offer to help you out with something like this, if you so desire. :slight_smile: