UNIX – Creating your site

Web Development

Does EasyStreet develop Web sites?

EasyStreet provides no Web site development services, but we have relationships with a number of local developers to whom we can refer you. If you need help finding a developer, call our main office 503-646-8400 (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday – Friday) and one of our Account Managers can recommend one to you.

 

Create Your Web Site

Web sites are composed of text files and images. The text files are written with a special code, HTML, which determines the site’s appearance. We recommend outlining your ideas for your site on paper first, and then create it in HTML. If this is your first site, keep it simple.

Remember, the main page of your site (often called the home page) must be named one of the file names listed below. Having a page with one of the accepted home page names allows people to type in www.yourdomain.com and be taken automatically to the main page of your site.

Design Tips

Your site’s appearance says a great deal about you or your company. If you are looking for some ideas about how to make great sites, these are a couple of good places to start.

Write your own HTML

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is very easy to learn language for formatting web pages. It consists of content (the writing you want on your page) and tags (the formatting for your page). Below are a couple of tutorials and a link to the World Wide Web Consortium, the group that defines the tags for HTML.

What software can be used to edit or publish my web site?

  • Use an HTML or text editor to edit the pages, and use an FTP program to publish them.
  • Use MacroMedia Dreamweaver to create and publish the pages.
  • Use another graphical editor, such as Macromedia HomeSite to both edit and publish content. Settings will vary depending upon which editor you are using.
  • FrontPage is not supported.
    We do not support Front Page in our Unix environment. Customers needing to use Front Page to edit/publish their site should consider our Windows Hosting. FrontPage is fully supported in our Windows hosting environment.

These programs help make it easy to create your web pages. They allow you to focus on writing the content and placing your pictures, by helping you with the HTML.

 

File Names

What names can my home page have?

Your web hosting account comes with an “Under Construction” page named index.phtml. Please remember to remove the index.phtml file when you no longer need it. In general, you should have only one file with one of the home page (or index page) names below.

You can use the following filenames to indicate the home page (index) for your directories:

  • index.html (default), index.htm, index.shtml, index.phtml, index.php
  • These also work: index.wml, index.asp, index.cfm, index.php3

If you want your home page to be titled differently from the above names, we recommend that you use the DirectoryIndex command in an .htaccess file.

Every directory (folder) of your web site should have one file with one of the above names. Having multiple files with the above index names in a single directory is not recommended. If you have more than one index file in a directory, only one of them will work, and it is difficult to tell in advance which one will work.

 

Are their any other filename restrictions?

Filenames are case sensitive and cannot contain spaces. Because your web server has a Unix environment, upper and lower case letters are recognized as different filenames. EasyStreet recommends using all lowercase filenames on your web site, and removing all spaces from file names.

 

Alternate Browsers

It’s always a good idea to check your web page in more than one browser. Simply put, HTML isn’t an absolute set of rules for writing your page, just a set of guidelines that some browsers follow better, or worse than others. If having a wide audience is important to you it is a good idea to check your page in another company’s Internet browser. Here are a few of our favorites.

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