Green and White Online : Web Publishing

When you surf on the net, you read information, you use email services and you play games online - the Internet is such a fabulous that it draws your attention to the screen using words, images and interactive elements. Every book has its author. Every building has its architect. And so every web site has its webmaster (or sometimes its web architect).

If you want to share your ideas to the people all over the world, making web pages might be the most convenient solution. Web publishing can be divided into six steps - defining the aim, preparing content, designing the hierarchy and the organization of the pages, designing the layout, uploading the pages and maintaining the site. Let me tell you step by step now.

The first step, defining the aim of your web site, is the most crucial but least technical step in making a web site. A slight difference in the aim may bring out tremendous differences in the resulting web site. For example, the data and information that are required in making a personal homepage is almost completely different from that required in making a commercial homepage. There are a lot of web sites out there. Almost every site has a different aim. I believe most of you want to make a page to share your views and experiences and to make some new friends on the Net. In cyber phrase, this type of page is called a 'personal homepage'.

Prepare the Contents

The second step is to prepare the contents. This part may take the longest time in the process of making a web site. Once you set your aim, you can prepare and collect the things you want to be included in your web site. The contents may not be only in text, but can also be in the format of pictures, photos, music clips or video clips. To import the things into your computer, you need quite a lot of tools.

To input texts, you need a text editor like Microsoft Word or Notepad. To translate your photos into digital images, you need a scanner and a photo editing software, like Jasc Paint Shop Pro, which is the program I recommend.

If you want to provide music or videos in your site, you will need some advanced tools like Cakewalk Pro Audio, Ulead MediaStudio and Adobe Premiere. If you want your friends to see some other web sites, you can also include hyperlinks, which means some texts that will bring you to another page when you click on them (you may simply treat them as buttons).

Besides, your site can also provide interactive contents like guestbooks and discussion forums. If you do not know how to write the program, you can get geared up programs from many Internet service providers, such as LinkExchange and Beseen.com.

Finally, as the Internet pages use the HTML format, you need to put all your elements into an HTML editor, for example, Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Once you have your contents prepared, you need to plan the order of the pages. Please note that the organization of a web site is different from the organization of a book or a newspaper. The pages do not necessarily follow a linear arrangement like a book. The pages can be linked with one another using hyperlinks. To make it easy, divide your site into sections and group your articles according to the sections. After that, you need to create a set of hyperlinks that bring your readers to the different pages in your web site. Most HTML editors, as mentioned before, can help you to manage the hyperlinks and the hierarchy of your web site.

However, exciting contents and a well-defined site structure is not enough. An attractive design will usually draw readers' attention to your site. How can you make an eye-catching design for your site? First you need to train yourself to be an expert of an image editing software, such as Jasc Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. But that is not enough. To write a good literature, besides knowing all the writing skills, you also need to have literature sense. To develop such a literature sense, you need to study it for a very long time and have some art sense. Similarly, to make an attractive design, you also need some art sense and you need to study design for quite a long time.

After you have prepared the whole site, it is time for you to show it to the people in the world. First you need to find a place to be the home of your homepage. There is really an amazing number of web space providers in the Internet. Some common providers like Geocities and Easyspace can give you up to 25 Megabytes of web space, which is enough for a moderately large website (the Green and White Online consumes about 40 Megabytes only.). Also, most Internet connection service providers like Netvigator and iCable will give their users web space for their web pages. Next, you need to upload your website. You do not need to worry too much about this step because most web space providers will give you adequate instructions on how to upload files to their servers.

It is not the end after you have uploaded your web site. To keep readers coming back, you need to add new materials into your web site. You may update it once a week, once a month, but do not care too much about that, as this process will consume much of your time, thus affecting your academic progress.