HowTo:Create a website

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Public awareness of sea sponges going downhill lately? Your blog having fewer than ten readers a day? None of the Beanie Babies in your collection selling? Your spouse threatening to leave you? All of these problems and more can be solved with a personal homepage, blog, wiki, or online store. All it takes is Frontpage Express and little creativity to design your own web site!

Introduction[edit]

This is a web page. It is also a special kind of web page called a wiki. Don't be scared; that's just some ~~pointless drivel~~ material that we'll cover later. You know practically everything about designing (making) a web page just from going to one (a web page). If you want to make a web page, you have come to the right place. Don't know how the hell you survived this long in a digital world without knowing, grumble, grumble, cough.

Why should I have a web site?[edit]

In this digital age, everyone should have a website to call their own. If you can't take my word for it, this statistic speaks for itself: The number of websites has doubled more than 100 times since 1996, while the sum of actual content has remained the same. This clearly means that more people than ever are making personal websites. It is now easier than ever to create your first website, even a pot smoking old geezer hippie could do it.

First steps[edit]

The first step is to decide what you want your website to be about. The most common myth about the internet is that content is everything. The world is so full of information these days that people don't stay at websites that have lots of content. A good example of this is the about:blank. It has absolutely no content, yet it receives more hits than CNN, Fox News and Google combined. Since the blank page idea is already taken, the challenge is to find an idea for a website just as useless. For example, you might want to create a blog.

Get a website maker[edit]

After you have decided what you want your website to be about, you need a program to create the website. One can easily use Notepad, but Microsoft FrontPage is the best choice because of the quality HTML code it generates. If you don't have FrontPage, Microsoft Word will work just as well.

Next, open up your website maker and start copy and pasting stuff from other websites. Images are fine too. Make sure that you add a no-right-click script, so that other people can't steal their stuff back. Things you can steal include: games, images, and jokes.

Markup language[edit]

<html><body><strong><title><meta></meta></title></strong></body></html>

Relax! Don't be alarmed by the unintelligible jumble of scary characters I just needlessly threw at you. That is called markup language. It is primarily used by advanced site designers to make that interactive stuff. This particular markup language would produce: "Error 300: Invalid HTML document."

For our first example, we'll make a parakeet fan site. Open Notepad (the text editor) and type this in:

<html>
<body>
<font face="Comic Sans MS" size=+2>
omg lol i love PARAKEATS
</html>
</body>
</font>

Don't forget to close the tags in the same order you opened them! The "html" tag tells the web browser that it still has a job, the "body" tag tells the browser that your web page hasn't been decapitated, and the "font" tag says that you aren't a slave to the World Wide Web Consortium with its rules and recommendations. Ahem. The above produces:

omg lol i love PARAKEATS

The large lettering will make readers understand better. But we're still not there yet; we need to add a splash of colour. In the body tag, put color=pink, and in the font tag, put color=yellow. This is just an example of course; in the real web page you'll make you should use the principle of understated design. That means that you should choose colours that are as similar as possible.

omg lol i love PARAKEATS

Wow, like, girlalicious, baby! This'll really make your pad stand out.

Tips[edit]

Some tips for website creation:

Colors Lots of people love colors. One likes green, other blue, the third one - red so make your site multicolored; that would fit in everyone's mind.

Go high tech lots of images, flash animations, and javascript. The slower your site makes computers go, the more impressive people will think it is.

Links People love links. Link to every site you can think of.

But don't use simple basic links! Users can drag these to another browser page, right click to open in a new window or a tab, or even gods forbid see where the link is pointing. This is too much information and too much control for a user. Hide the links in buttons, images, java scripts and such. This will also make it much harder for users to share the link targets with others, copy or save them. Think how much time you save users if they can't use those links in any way except just by clicking on them. Better yet, they may be turned off by this and never come back to waste your site's bandwidth...

Multiple <body> tags with attributes are the simplest and cleanest ways to change font size and color. They should not be used to define the beginning and end of a document, due to the fact that most web browsers will sort it out somehow anyway.

Compatibility is not an issue. Don't think of it as your site not working on other people's browsers. Just think of it being different and therefore more creative. It's a whole new dimension to the web, man. If you are still concerned, simply paste a "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" banner on every page.

Pop-Ups A good website has hundreds if not thousands of ads, and popups make it more fun. Just watch as the money comes rolling in as people fruitlessly click on the X, just to bring more to the screen. (Great party trick)

Under Construction Make sure your readers know that you are still working on your website if you haven't updated it in several months.

Other cool stuff[edit]

Your web site still won't be as popular if you don't add some of these great add-ons:

Animated GIFs - Can't overstate this enough. Motion is the message. Your site just won't be fun without these dancing around ~~annoying the heck out of everyone~~ getting your point across in an effective manner.
Rainbow dividers - Nothing says, "the section above is a different one than the section below," better than rainbow dividers. The more the merrier. (The above tip on animated GIFs also applies.)
The <blink> tag - If you don't have enough animated GIFs, you can't go wrong with the <blink> tag. The <marquee> tag also works similar wonders.

Content & Games - Why write these? There's lots of content up for grabs on free licensing sites like Uncyclopedia! I mean expensive, bad content sites like Microsoft. And you can always rip some games off ~~Newgrounds~~ ~~Candystand~~ Newgrounds. You'll get visitors in droves just waiting to see the special way you organised what they've probably never seen before!
Motion Tweens - Macromedia Flash offers the latest in morphing technologies. So you could have a picture of a badger, the bad animal you're not promoting, morphing into its arch-nemesis, the parakeet, which is the mammal you are a fan of.
iFrames - The latest in web tech from Apple, iFrames let your web site have multiple scroll bars dedicated to little subpages floating in your main page ~~that are blank on most browsers~~.
Scrolling Status Line - Greet visitors by adding a scrolling message to the browser's status bar! To achieve this nifty trick, just copy and paste the code for it from any tutorial site. Visitors will be awed at your technical prowess. Even better, welcome guests with an alert box. Just put in this code:

<script type="text/javascript">

alert("Hi there!");

</script>

My web site's greeting reads, "Welcome, traveler of the information superhighway, to my Parakeet web Site! I hope you decide to stay and live INSIDE your web browser."

Background Music - These are the mother of all enhancements. Don't attempt this unless you are really hard-core. If you're a bit soft, you might start off with some MIDI theme music from a 60's TV show. Then work your way up to a man burping. Hilarious!

Hosting your website[edit]

Once you've made your webpage. You want to put it somewhere for everyone to see. There are many companies out there who are in business just for that. Some of the best include Zoomshare, Geocities and AOL