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Personal Web Site Basics |
Creating your own home page or a basic web site can be enjoyable, but it since it depends on having a lot of little details done correctly, it helps to have a guide, and these tips are designed to help you get started.
First, create your site, or hire a web site developer. Then transfer it to EasyStreet. Finally, visit your site. Make sure it looks as good and appears quickly. If you are having problems viewing your site, see: Why can't I see my web page?
Web sites are composed of text files and images. The text files are written with a special code, HTML, which determines the appearance of your web page. It may help you to outline 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 front page of your site (often called the home page)
must be named index.htm to make that
page appear when people surf to your site (index.html works too).
Your sites 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.
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.
And HTML document is simple text, just the text of your page with special comments called tags added to it. The tags indicate to the web browser the structure, e.g. the top (head) and contents (body), of the web page. They also control the layout of the page, titles, paragraphs, and line breaks. You can also use HTML tags to include pictures, scripts, and links to other pages.
When you write your page, you create text files of HTML and then post them to your WWW directory on the EasyStreet server users.easystreet.com.
It's a good idea to learn by doing. Start with a first page, look at the links above for help, and get a book or use the View Source commands in your Internet browser to get tips from other this web site and other people's pages.
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.
Netscape has a good web site creation tool called Composer built into it. Below are links to other programs that you may be interested in using.
EasyStreet provides the space for your site on the Internet, but does not help you create the sites. However, if you need help creating your site you'll need the services of a web site developer. 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.
There are many places on the Internet to find copyright free images. You can find them by searching through clip art collections. If pictures are not specifically marked copyright free, or copyleft, they are protected by copyright provisioned and you cannot use them. (Be careful about that).
The best way to get the files that make up your new web site from your personal computer to your directory at EasyStreet is via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). FTP programs establish a connection between your computer and EasyStreet. This allows you to easily see what is in your director at EasyStreet and send files back and forth between your computer and that directory).
Your personal web site is on our users.easystreet.com web server. When you use and ftp program login to the server, you want to put your pages in the WWW directory that you see there. The WWW is the public directory where your web pages will be visible to people looking for them in an Internet browser. It's often helpful to have a public directory and a private directory, and our accounts are set up so that the first directory you log into is private, and anything in the WWW directory is public.
These instructions are written for the basic 10M website that comes with individual Dial up and DSL accounts. They can also be applied to other accounts, just use the hostname, username and password from your Hosting Account Information sheet.
users.easystreet.comIf your ftp client requires that you specify a complete path, use one of the following:
ftp://users.easystreet.com/users/<username>/ or ftp://<username>@users.easystreet.com/easystreet/users/<username>/
We recommend that you use a separate program, rather than the publishing features built into some HTML editors (i.e. FrontPage, Adobe GoLive). Many of these FTP programs are shareware, and allow you to more easily move files and see what is in your web directories at EasyStreet.
Open your Internet Browser (Internet Explorer, or Netscape Navigator)
and open location: http://users.easystreet.com/username/
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.
Errors in your HTML can keep visitors from viewing your web site, or seeing it the way that you'd like it to. Some HTML Editors allow have tools built into them that allow you to check your HTML and make sure that it has been written correctly.
Some online tools:Why can't I just use a web browser to verify that my HTML is correct?
Most Internet Browsers (Internet Explorer, and Netscape) are tolerant of HTML errors, and they often display sites differently in each browser. That makes it hard to see if your site is written correctly.
Unix is CASE SENSITIVE, upper and lowercase letters matter! Make sure that your home page is named index.htm index.html not Index.htm or INDEX.HTM or Index.HTM.
Unlike Windows and Apple operating systems, Unix is case sensitive. That means that unlike your home computer, our server thinks that Index.htm and index.htm are 2 totally different files. If it is looking for index.htm, it will not find Index.htm because it's not the same - one of the letters is uppercase. We recommend that you always use lowercase filenames to avoid these types of problems.
Make sure that your web files are in the WWW folder.
If you see a list of your files, you probably don't have a file named index.htm or index.html. Double-check that your home page is named index, and that you don't have any uppercase letters in the name.
If you have changed your WWW folder, double check that its permissions are now world readable and world writable. If you don't understand what this means and you haven't changed that directory, it is unlikely that your directory permissions are a problem.
img src tag. Remember that you must match upper and lowercase letters.WWW directory, and it's in the same place that you refer to in the img src tag.Our personal web sites are our most basic level of web site hosting. Scripts like Perl, CGI will not work if you upload them to your personal web site. Instead they often simply look like regular text pages, or give an error.
If you'd like to use scripts, you may want to upgrade to one of our regular web site hosting accounts.
Now that you have created it, posted it and tested it, share your site with the world!
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