★Creating your own website
Starting your own website is something that sounds so cool and tech-savvy. Something you might think that only IT pros are capable of. The truth is, it really isn't that impossible to create your own website from scratch, even if you have never attended computing courses or studied any IT majors.
Or at least I haven't. I started learning webdesigning when I was 13 during the initial blog craze. Since then, I have been learning from friends, tutorial sites and mostly, via trial-and-error. I admit that learning how to create websites without any prior knowledge will require you lots of patience and determination. But you can take my word that when you see the fruits of your labour, nothing beats that sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
Getting a free website to start your journey is the easiest and best way. I started from working with blogs. Go ahead and get yourself a free account with Blogger, WordPress, MySpace, or LiveJournal. Blogger is no doubt one of the more popular blogging platforms used today. Experimenting and learning using blogs has its benefits because when your friends visit your blog, you get feedback on your colour schemes, layout, navigation, etc.! And at the same time, linking your friends' blogs to yours allows you to go blog-hopping. See how others design their blogs (if they do design on their own), and take note of those that stand out. There's really no quick and fast method to pick up webdesigning skills overnight. It takes you time to experience and learn.
Alternatives to blogs, for serious site builders, I'd recommend using Bravenet or FreeWebs to host your site for free. I started off using FreeWebs and right now, I am actually using Bravenet. Personally, I prefer Bravenet for its user-friendliness, and the mega lots of webtools they provide. Still on the look out for a good host (which I will probably have to pay for :/ ), do drop me an email if you have a reliable hosting site to recommend :)
★Getting Noticed
We all know how vast the World Wide Web is, hence, though it is easy to get yourself onto the WWW, getting noticed and receiving high traffic is a totally different issue.
The first thing you could do is to get your website into search engines. Try these links to Yahoo! or Google. Once you've submitted your site to these two major search engines, other search engines should be able to pick you up once you're listed.
Another common way to get picked up by search engines is by adding meta tags to your site's HTML code. You could try inserting the following code between the <head> and </head> tags. Do remember to change the parts in bold:
<META NAME="description" content="type a description of your site here.">
★Domain Names & Webhosting
A domain name basically runs in the format of www.MYDOMAIN.*, and usually end with .com, .net, .org (this is for non-profit organisations), .biz, .info, or with a country code like .sg for Singapore, .au for Australia and .uk for United Kingdom.
There are tonnes of sites on the WWW that offer packages to purchase domain names and/or webhosting facilities, so you really don't need to worry about not getting a webhosting package that isn't exactly what you need. I do caution first-timers to do some surveying and comparison before coming to a decision of whom to purchase from, because I'm sure you don't want to discover a better deal after getting your own domain name and/or webhosting space.
★Introducing HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Mark-up Language and is the basic computer language used for coding websites. Codes always start with an open bracket: "<" and end off with a close bracket: ">". Although HTML codes tend to look monotonous, lengthy and confusing, they do contain some logic :)
The basic rule of thumb is that whatever you start, you've got to end. For example, codes within the body of the page can be found between the <body> and </body>, where <body> denotes the start of the body and </body> denotes the end of the body. Similarly, if I want to do some formatting - let's say I want certain words to be of font-face "Verdana", it'll probably look something like this:
Note that the ending tag always have an additional slash symbol "/".
In the HTML source of any site, there will always be a HEAD section and a BODY section. Codes found in the HEAD section are usually to do with formatting (css), general information regarding your site (e.g. title of your page, meta tags, etc.) as well as other javascripts that are added on to the site.
Now that you've got a rough picture of HTML painted in your mind, go on an explore! Feel free to look up at more specific HTML tutorials on this site whenever you meet a stumbling block and I hope you'll be able to find some answers and clarify your doubts. If you still can't find the solution to your questions, go ahead and post it at our forum. You'll never know, someone out there might be puzzled over the same thing as you! Of course, you could always email your queries to smileisland@mind-sketch.com, but please be considerate and not spam my mailbox ;)
Go ahead, draw your world! Good luck!
