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I have to confess … please don’t hate me — I loved FrontPage. I began using FrontPage when it was first owned by Vermeer in the mid-90′s. I have owned every version from that initial version and have recently begun learning Microsoft Expression Web 2. (I had Expression Web 1 on my PC for awhile but never used it.)

I’ve used a lot of different products over the years including NetObjects Fusion and Dreamweaver. I currently use Dreamweaver CS3 for most of my web development, mostly because of its tight integration with Flash, Photoshop and Fireworks. I am hoping to learn the entire Microsoft Expression Studio as I’ve read lots of good reviews and I find the interface comfortable. Read the rest of this entry »

If you follow these planning guidelines for a better quality web site, you will save hours of frustration later.

Once you have registered your domain name and arranged your hosting, it is very tempting to dive right in putting pages on your new web site. Without proper planning, however, you will quickly find that the web you have woven has become very tangled.

The first think to consider is the focus of your web site. In general, is your web site to share information, sell products or build relationships? Who is your primary audience? You also need to consider how technically savvy your readers are? What age group or social demographic? What information will your readers expect to find on your web site? What information do you have readily available for your readers? What types of information do you expect to put on your Web site, e.g., calendar, newsletters, staff profiles, etc.? Who will be the “webmaster” — the web manager — of your web site? Will you have assistance in maintaining your web site? How often do you expect to update the content on your web site? How much time per week or per month will you dedicate to updating your site? Read the rest of this entry »

For the purpose of this example, we are going to use Google Sites.

Navigate to http://sites.google.com with your browser. You will need a Google account to create a free site. If you use any of Google’s services, such as Google Mail, you already have account. Click on Create site. Read the rest of this entry »

“Build it and they will come” — at least, that’s what you’ve probably heard from a lot of web design firms wanting your dollars but not caring if your web site is a success. We’ll cover how to attract visitors on another page. Once you’ve got them, however, you’ve got to keep them interested. If your navigation isn’t easy to understand and consistent across all the pages of your site.

The components that make up the navigational structure of a web site are known as navigational elements. The first thing to consider is your domain or company name. If your company name is well branded, potential visitors may enter it into their browser’s address bar or a search engine. So although your name isn’t normally considered a navigational element, it becomes one when used to locate your web site. If this is a possibility for your site, keep your web site name short, don’t use punctuation or unusual spelling. You should also keep your subfolder names short, too, and for best search engine rankings, use keywords. Read the rest of this entry »

To view pages published on the World Wide Web you need a web browser. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari are the most popular. The pages that you see on the Internet have been created by publishers such as yourself using a special markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This language provides the instructions to the browser on how to display the page.

The simplest form of HTML pages, also called static HTML, can be created by anyone with a text editor. For example, Windows users could use the built-in Windows Notepad application to create web pages. Although you could use this application, there are other HTML editors available which are much easier to use. Notepad2 is a free, lightweight editor that includes syntax highlighting for a number of programming languages including HTML. A more comprehensive editor is Arachnophilia, which is built using Java so that it will work on a number of different operating systems.

Most word processing applications, like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice provide a way to save regular documents as HTML documents but they usually contain a lot of extra code to support the formatting you have used. Read the rest of this entry »