ARTICLE: WEBMASTERING

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"Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." Voltaire, letter to M. le Riche, February 6, 1770.

By Jonathan L. Katz

On Building a Website 

The overpowering beauty of the Internet is its anarchic chaos that somehow usually finds a method to its madness - Jon Katz

The Internet is an incredible resource for communicating and for a whole host of other computerized activities. A huge gap remains between the people who want to have their own websites, and the people who actually have them. This article is geared towards narrowing this gap.

To start a website, one can go the full service route with a high quality web design and hosting company like Pixel Chix Multimedia. A middle ground is to hire a webmaster company that will show the client how to do some of its own site updating and maintenance. 

A website can be built on one's own, too. For those who have limited html (hypertext markup language) knowledge, Microsoft FrontPage 2000 is a web design software option. 

To launch a site onto the web, a sitehost is needed for parking the site on the Internet. Quality sitehosting is critical to a successful website. Informational websites of modest size can function sufficiently with a shared sitehost server, so long as the sitehost's servers are almost never down (too many shared servers don't fit this requirement). Our law firm's current sitehost server has apparently never been down; we use Emphasis On as our sitehost.  Websites with more bells and whistles, including online shopping and thousands of daily visits, likely will fare better with a dedicated sitehost server. 

Software is needed to upload a website onto the Internet; cute.ftp is an option. The website should be tied to a unique domain name. Domain names can be registered with Network Solutions and several other companies. 

The webmaster faces the choice of using cookies to track visitors' usage of the site. This choice should never be taken lightly. On the one hand, cookies can be used for the most effective method to track traffic to a website, and can also be used for protecting against unauthorized entry into password-protected areas of the website. However, cookies also pose an undue invasion of privacy, so much so that our law firm does not use cookies. Some websites that we link to, however, do use cookies. 

Cookie-free statistics tracking software is available. The cookie-free Extreme Tracking software records such useful information as the number of daily visits to each unique page, keywords used to find the website, and the referring URL names. 

Selecting and presenting content is a vital part of building a website. When a website's content becomes extensive enough, a sitemap is advisable. Webmastering also involves circulating the website address through search engines and other means. 

Numerous classes are available to beginning webmasters. The Capital PC Users Group -- which is a phenomenal organization for any computer user to join -- presents several webmastering classes each year from beginner to advanced. CPCUG's website should also have links to additional PC users groups in the United States for such classes.

Quality websites are constant works in progress. At their best, websites erode many of the pre-web financial and resource barriers to delivering ideas, messages, and creativity to the public. 

Copyright to this article is jointly held by YNOTNews and Marks & Katz, LLC. This article, in edited form, appeared here in YNOTNews on March 13, 2003. (ADVISORY: The YNOTNews website includes explicit adult visual and written content). 

NOTE: We no longer recommend the sitehost listed in this article. 

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