Welcome . . . and bon apertit . . . mine host

This has been a hectic week trying to get work done with my most powerful pc out of action. Arrrggghhh . . . I should have stayed with my Mac. Oh well.

I think that I will focus this blog on the skills and expertise that you need to manage a web site. This is not a simple subject, by any means. After many efforts at trying to get pages up I have realised that you need to be organised, organised and even organized.

First there is the matter of content, regardless of what the subject material is. Without content then you don't have a thing to publish on the web . . . and one or two or even a dozen pages is just not enough. You need content, content and more content - which must be organised, legible, readable, understandable and of value to your visitors.

Then once you have your content organised you must get it coded into html format - at a minimum. Before long you will be sweltering with php, asp, ssi, xml, java and all sorts
of obscure programming languages. You need to work the bugs out of pages that link or don't link or that have mistakes and errors in them. Then you need to see what your pages look like on different computers, with different operating systems, different browsers, different browser settings and with all manner of small medium and large monitors.

Then you need to find a host to publish your pages and a domain or subdomain to park your pages at so that you have a fixed address, or a unique relocatable location where people can easily find you. And even then, you have to index your pages on a regular basis and submit indexes to various search engines so that your site comes up whenever people are searching for whatever it might be that you offer, whether products of some sort or just information about
whatever subject it is that you are so interested in, that you must get in up on the net.

That's not the start of it. You need to monitor your traffic and find out how people are getting to your site; you need to know where your visitors come from and how they found out about you so that you can find more visitors. You need to put keywords into meta tags so that search engines have more reasons to list your site. You need to have links on as many different sites as you can so that the search engines can see how popular you are.

You will need web counters, monitoring and diagnostic tools, marketing and promoting experience. You may even have to sell advertising, or even other people's products so that visitors can find out about your own products. You need to engage in e-commerce, you must be able to accept credit cards, bank transfers and cheques as well as forming links with organisations such as PayPal so that you can accept payment for your goods and services, you may need to consider advertising with Google AdWords, AdSense and other middlemen.

That has barely scratched the surface. I am investigating different types of free web hosting at the moment because my main server went down and has not come back up again. Consequently I have files scattered all over the world trying to link with files and servers in Australia, America and Europe. Therefore, my next blog is likely to be about the ins and outs of free web hosting. Not everything that is free is really free . . .


adios for now
Chris Loft