This missive is aimed at you folks just dipping your toes into this web-thing, that is, you think you need a web site, but aren't sure how to plunge in (or how much the whole enterprise is going to cost). Whether you've already decided to hire someone to build a site for you or are weighing your DIY options you need to know a few basic concepts.

I wrote this for someone whose goal was posting photos of their artwork online, so while I might emphasize photo galleries more than you'd care, that's ok-- the basic mechanisms apply.

I'll outline what you need (the parts) for a website, some options for meeting those needs, some examples of what that might finally look like, and finally, how your needs will drive the decisions to the above. I'll conclude by singing a mash-up of Green Day and June Christy tunes.

At no point will I pass the hat or in any other way take up a collection.

1. Parts of a Website

The three pieces one needs for any website are:

  1. A domain or URL
  2. Hosting
  3. Web pages and other site files (HTML, images, etc)

Some definitions and expansions on these concepts:

A domain name is the part after dub-dub-dub (that's "www"). My domain is:

pizzabytheslice.com

You already know a gazillion domains: google.com, npr.org, cbc.ca, marthastewart.com, amazon.com, ad infinitum.

Owning a domain means that you've hired a company like godaddy.com or register.com (known as registrars) to inform the world that you exclusively have the use of a particular domain.

At this point we inevitably experience "the phone book/ telephone company" analogy. It's a good 'un, you'll be humming it for the rest of the week, I'm sure.

A domain name is how we associate a human-friendly name, such as "boingboing.net" or "americanathebeautiful.com", with an address that's meaningful to a computer (an "IP address" is the series of numbers like "204.11.50.136" that computers need in order to find one another).

When you type a website's name (such as pizzabytheslice.com) into the address bar of your browser your computer asks another computer "what the heck is this 'pizzabytheslice.com' thing and where do I find it?". This, called a Domain Name Services (DNS) lookup -- is exactly like you picking up the phone and dialing 411.

Let's explore how we use the phone company's directory assistance service. First, we call info or get the operator (a trusted agent we believe to have the most up-to-date info).

An operator, or more likely a stupidly perky computer voice, asks "what listing, please?"

You say: "casa bianca pizza in eagle rock"

The operator then looks up the numbers he has associated with that business or residence in the city you want using his copy of the trusty phone book.

Well, almost the same thing goes on when you ask for a web site. Your web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc) asks another computer that it trusts to have a web domain translated into something meaningful, its IP address.

Say for example (again and again)"pizzabytheslice.com". How did your computer find this web page?

Well, the first thing it did was find the appropriate "phone book". In the telephone example they needed the city, state etc. Computers, too, need some general location info to start their search. The "location" part of a web address is the "dot-com" or "dot-org" at the end of the domain name. In the United States we have a gazillion, sorry, lots, including:

  • .com (commercial /business websites)
  • .gov (government sites)
  • .net ("network" site)
  • .org (organization, generally non-profit)
  • .edu (educational site, meaning schools & colleges)

These are just different "phone books" or ways of breaking down the ginormous virtual geography of the 'net into more manageable pieces (ginormous means roughly a metric shitload, give or take a smidgeon). Outside the US you'll see these localities:

  • .jp (japan)
  • .ca (Canada)
  • .uk (ummmm, oh, sure United Kingdom, I think someone told me once that this means "England" -- gosh, wish they'd just pick one name)

  • .tv (yeah, you thought this was one of ours... nope, it belongs to the tiny, tiny island of Tuvalu. Bill Gross over at Idealab! paid them millions to control the sales of their domains, but it is a country. For fifty-bucks their president will tattoo your name on his forehead, too. Bill'd do it for twenty, but he's that kind of guy)

These are Top Level Domains (TLDs)... you know what? You don't need to know this. Forget that I ever mentioned it. Good. Thanks.

Moving on.

Once the computer knows where the desired website generally lives (using the appropriate phone book based on the last bit of the domain name, the TLD) it then finds the exact listing for your site and returns the numbers your computer wants in order to exchange info with the website.

So owning a domain means paying someone to maintain your entry in the appropriate "phone books". Like I said, various companies do this for different fees, ranging from $0 to $35 for one year. Obviously, there's a catch to the free registration, after all, they do need to perform some work for you, and it's messy work, but we'll touch on what free means and whether it's good or not in just a few minutes. But the service they provide is sending out your master "phone book listing" to the various "switchboard" and "directory assistance operators" and then keeping all of these folks in-synch if any changes are made throughout the year.

Sometimes you need more than just a domain to find a site, like a professor's personal web pages on a college website. For this you'd need the complete URL.

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the sexy way of saying "this is the address or location of a specific file". And, yes, to geeks this is sexy. It's more specific than just a domain. A domain just says a particular computer, a URL tells which file on that computer. Fortunately, they've (the smart folks who thought up the world wide web) provided a mechanism for having a default file returned if someone doesn't specify which file they wanted. Often it's "index.htm". that's just a file. nothing special. the only difference is that frequently people tell some software running on their web server (computer where a web site lives) to send this file as a default if a file isn't specified in the request (URL).

Example, the radio station KCRW's website:

a domain:
kcrw.org

a URL with no file specified (the default page on KCRW's site for the Left, Right, and Center show):
kcrw.org/show/lr

a URL that includes a specific page:
kcrw.org/music/charts/charts.html

There, take a breather. We're well underway and you're doing great. Next: hosting.

I just mentioned a web server. Web pages must reside somewhere. Gotta have a computer for every file to call home. As it happens there's very little that's special about the computers that run web sites, they just have some special software running on them that allows them to find files and talk to other computes. This software is the web server and it's almost always the free version called Apache or Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Forget the names, they aren't important and I saw wisps of smoke coming out of your ears as you reached overload.

All you need to know is that in order for people to see your website the files need to live somewhere -- on a computer running web server software. Moreover, these computers are (hopefully) running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- otherwise people get a nasty error that says your website is "down". This just means that the computer was turned off or broken. So what most of us do is hire a company to maintain a bunch of healthy computers that they leave on, day and night, that will store your web pages.

This is hosting.

Again, it comes in free and pay versions.

hosting is a service provided by a hosting company wherein they provide web servers where you can upload your web site pages and files and other people can access them from their web browsers. Hosting companies provide you a set amount of storage space (on a regular hard drive, again, no magic) and allow for a certain quantity of downloads per month. The last bit is the bandwidth which is how much stuff other people are allowed to download per month (a measure of the signal that actually travels across the wires and fiber optic cables that connect all of the world's computers: this is the net, i.e. computer network, that we mean when we say world wide web).

Web servers run all the time, waiting for someone to request information from them.

Finally, there are the web pages. This is that HTML crud you've heard so much about. It's just like a Word document or any other file you'll see on your personal computer. Typically it has a file extension of HTM or HTML. Not clever.

Web pages are really dumbly, beautifully simple: elegant and cool in this simplicity. It's the text you read with some "marks" around the words that tell your web browser how it should be displayed. You can also include links to other web pages or to pictures. Links to other pages are "hyper" links ("hyper" as in extremely active, allowing you to waste hours and hours at a time with little to show for it... hmmm, while doing this the computer is actually hyper, you're rendered rather sloth-like, odd).

For this reason the marks around the text and the links are together called Hyper Text Markup Language or just HTML (language because the people that write HTML really want credit for being able to "speak" with computers, so we give them this some concession, a minor conceit to make them happy and hopefully get them to stop talking about Deep Space Nine and Lord of the Rings long enough to get some work done).

OK, a recap, because by gosh, I've forgotten what we were talking about.

A web site is a set of three things:

  1. a location designated by a domain name or URL
  2. that is hosted on a web server
  3. and is made up of a bunch of picture, sound and text files that use HTML to organize and link them.

The whole thing works like a phone company switch board, with operators that lookup the numbers associated with the names you know and various extensions routing your call to the correct department or desk.

There. That's a web site. That's also the hard part. The rest, choosing how to get yourself one of these cool toys, is quite easy.

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2. the options

With no info to go on I'll plunge in with a few quick suggestions as if you had an overwhelming, burning desire to hear me ramble on even more about geek-stuff. For purposes of discussion I'm going to reference my own site PizzaByTheSlice.com frequently, just to illustrate various concepts and approaches.

Immediately you've got two choices for getting your stuff "up on the web": get your own domain and hosting or signup for a service, such as geocites, where you essentially "piggyback" on an existing site.

Starting with the piggybacking options:

Flickr.com and the dozen or so popular and free photo posting sites offer decent products, giving you an easy way to upload photos onto their site and provide you with a simple means to add titles and descriptions. Most accommodate a customized URL. For example, I have some photos on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pizzabytheslice/

As you can see this serves up pictures easily, and allows you to add some text and capture visitor comments. Flickr, owned now by Yahoo!, allows you to host several sizes of your images, too.

The downside to this is that the appearance is set, completely locked; you can't modify the appearance at all.

You, of course, can also opt to use a free hosting site, such as Yahoo's! (hmmm, again?) geocities, which is definitely cheap -- and kinda crappy. Here's a completely lame example (I just created this to illustrate a point):

http://www.geocities.com/courtscarter/badtzmaru.html

The upside is that this took about two minutes and costs me nothing. That's cool. And there are many free site companies, some better, some much, much worse. I just choose geocities because it's so popular (and I totally dig Bad Badtz Maru).

So, what's my gripe with a free site?

Ads. I hates 'em. I'm not saying they're wrong to force you to show ads, people know there's a catch when a company gives you a free site, but it is kinda lame. There are some services with fewer ads, but still, I do not recommend this approach. Some services even use the most offensive ad concept of all: the pop-up ad!!! Arggh! I really hate ads.

You can upgrade your geocities account to get rid of the ads. This costs about $40 a year, depending upon what specials they're running at any given moment. the standard is something like $60 a year.

Before leaving the free, instant-website options: if you want to be blogging inside of ten minutes and the considerations below don't apply (how's that for a teaser to get you to read on) then definitely jump over to blogger.com, or blogspot or wordpress, signup, and get on with it... couldn't be easier or cheaper.

So, besides the ads, what is wrong with one of these solutions?

First, if you want to promote your site take a look at the URL you get with a free service. That's what would be on your business card, etc. It's, well, ugly. and long. And difficult to remember. And ugly. Oh, said that.

Second, emails. It's good form to ask your friends & customers to only remember as little as possible, ideally, only one bit of information. This philosophy should carry over to your website and email. For example, ummm, how about more on me? OK:

site:
pizzabytheslice.com

email:
blahblah@pizzabytheslice.com

You keep reinforcing the message with a single (branded) domain and email address. Further, if people have your email they also know your website. You don't need to keep telling them "oh, yeah, my email is blah@yaddah.com but my website is geocities.com/blahdeeblah".

See? Cleaner. Easier to remember.

It's professional, and frankly, much cleaner to have your website and your email all glued together with a single branded domain, a domain that's yours.

OK, obviously I'm biased, after all, I pretend to be a professional webby-geek, right, so I'm just saying this to force you to spend oodles of money. Naaaahhh. Me? never.

My bias is to have a unique domain, but, if for money reasons or time or simplicity you want to go with free sites that's completely cool and I don't blame you. Web sties are what we call "time holes" -- you always spend more time tweaking them than you suspect that you will. always.

So flickr and geocities work for you? Then use them, I don't blame you.

KISS (keep it simple, stupid) is the golden rule.

if the only concern is cost, however, I think you'd be surprise. If you setup everything your self (meaning, you put some "sweat equity" -- your own time -- into the project) the costs run about this:

Register a domain name: $0 to $35 (most common are $0 and $10.
Purchase a hosting package: $25 - $100

Several hosting companies, including DreamHost.com, will register a domain name for you for free if you signup for a year of hosting. So included in their $80 a year is the cost of the registration. Something to factor in when comparing hosting. Not only the monetary value of this, but also the fact that it seamlessly integrates your domain and hosting setup -- which is actually really cool and speeds things along.

Companies such as telnap.com are cheap, but you'll need the price ($10) and hassles of registering a domain and configuring it to point to the correct host. not a big deal, but will take you some time.

Most hosting companies provide lots (or unlimited) email accounts. This is cool, since "branded email" is really important. also, trust me here, you never want to deal with setting up a mail server if you can help it. so we have a rule: whichever hosting company you choose must provide sufficient email accounts!

A cool feature nearly all provide is forwarding. You can have as many email addresses as you need but have all of the mail received by these accounts forwarded to your sbc account. Email forwarding consolidates email in a kick-butt manner by allowing you to read all of your emails, from different accounts, by checking only one master account.

I'll give you some patronizing advice about using your ISP for your primary email account at some point. In short, don't tie something as important as your email identity to something as transitory as who you happen to be paying to provide you with an internet connection at the moment. This is how they lock you in, with this threat of 'oh, but everyone already has my sbcglobal email address so I can't use a different or cheaper ISP". Don't get hooked. The first taste is free, but they'll own ya for life if your not careful. Get a free Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo email account; don't use the ones offered by your ISP -- especially AOL (imagine me screaming that last one quite loudly, my upstairs neighbor doesn't need to imagine).

Forwarding is one way to fix this, by the way.

Once you own a domain and have hosting you're on the hook to upload some files. Believe it or not, I'm NOT going to attempt to layout what this means or entails here. This is where I gotta draw the line since it's sooooooo involved to get specific. I can outline the general concepts.

A static site is edited via a program like Notepad or Word (there are several decent free programs available for doing this and some that cost a couple hundred dollars that make it really easy). It's really flexible but one needs a bit of knowledge in order to do this. it's the cheapest route in terms of, well, money if you hire someone to do it, but also in terms of time and complexity.

A dynamic site uses software running on the web server to make editing and managing pages easier. it's much more complicated to setup but offers benefits in addition to the ability to add or edit pages. features like user comments and RSS feeds are built-into most dynamic site applications.

If you haven't "many" pages, want quickness, transportability, and flexibility (trying-out several designs or each page needs to be different) static is probably your best choice. For static sites buying Dreamweaver is probably a solid investment. Its templating and library systems, built-in ftp, etc quickly allay any beliefs that this 800-pound gorilla rests undeservedly on its laurels. I said this is well suited for smaller sites, but SCAG, for example, has a few thousand pages and is edited and maintained using DW templates and library items.

On the other hand: lots of pages, frequent updates, less concern for custom pages and more focus on consistencies, interactivity (user comments) and RSS... these are built-ins for most dynamic Content Management Systems (CMS). There are many, many free applications for dynamic sites, ranging from blogging software (ex. WordPress) to enterprise publishing (Mambo, phpNuke, etc) to photo galleries and user bulletin boards (aka forums such as SMF phpBB).

Naturally, you can have it both ways, start static, see how that works, move to a dynamic if needs be. But consider the costs of conversion -- this can be time consuming and costly. You can even sneak in great features such as searches on an otherwise static site.

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3. photo gallery examples

Just to demonstrate the types of software out there, here are examples of different static and dynamic sites that I've worked on.

My own site, pizza, has lots of static photo galleries that use some JavaScript I wrote to make them easier to maintain:
http://pizzabytheslice.com/photos/

Another site I've done uses a free photo gallery software. We chose this because there are lots of people, located all of the world who needed to be able to add and manage the photos for this dance group. Thus we went with a dynamic solution:
http://kalipayan.org/photos/

A different approach using still a different dynamic site program is this site I'm just finishing for "slide archivist" Charles Phoenix. For his site we needed a "user comments" feature. We also wanted him to be able to post announcements and other info that didn't have a picture associated with it.
http://www.americanathebeautiful.com/slide-of-the-week/

And, as I've already mentioned, flickr offers a decent photo gallery for free:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pizzabytheslice/

There's a gazillion ways to do this, depending upon your desires and, naturally, budget.

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4. what should you do?

I don't know. It depends, as I said, on how much time you have, how much money you can spend (if any, you can do this all yourself), and even more, how many photos / works you want to put online, how frequently you're going to be updating the site, and how popular you think the site will be.

Lots of photos means you need a "larger hosting plan" -- that is more disk storage.

If your site is really popular you'll need more bandwidth so more people can access your files (again, large hosting plan).

If you don't really need anything sexy you don't need to "design" the site at all; just use available (free) templates or the default look for any of the dynamic tools you might choose.

Lastly, many hosting companies provide one-click installs for popular blogging, photo gallery, forums, and mailing list management applications. All for free. You'll almost always be able to install a suite such as WordPress with little technical knowledge via a web interface (fantastico is a popular one). Once installed visit the home pages for your installed apps -- many have dozens to hundreds of free downloads to add more features to your site, including "themes" (or looks, also called skins, for your site -- again really easy install).

If you want help doing any of this or just need some hand-holding, hire some consultant to sit with you for a few hours to lock-down what you need to do. You may be able to do it on your own, with minimum support from a techie (or none). A good techie won't try to foist more on you than you need, opting for a "phased" approach; rolling out the features you need as you grow into them. (note: please be willing to pay these knowledgeable folks a living wage, however)

That, for the record, was my sales pitch... I'm not offended if you don't want to hire some bloke like me to build a site for you. There are gazillions of people who can do sites, so you want whoever you choose to be someone you're able to comfortably speak with, who understands what you want, and can talk to you with a minimum of jargon. It should always makes sense. If they can't explain it, they don't know it and you should move on.

And now that you've read this, you're a smarter consumer.

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