Creating a Website

The Process of Creating and Maintaining a Website

To get a site, you need three things: someone with the skills to design and code a website; space on a computer connected to the internet, for your pages to sit (called a host); and someone who has a web connection to physically publish the site - ie send the pages to the host site, and change them when required.

The steps involved are:

	Set your aims - who, what, when, how often, where and why are you both communicating
	Decide your limitations - budget, technology, etc.
	Organise the information and assemble it
	Decide the style of the site, and set the common design elements that will run through your site
	Decide the design of each part of it
	Do the detailed information layout and coding of reply forms etc.
	Test your site - ideally on different computers and with different web browsers, and certainly with different people!
	Publish your site - get it actually onto the web - which requires a web connection, and the details of the host site
	Publicise your site - anywhere and everywhere you can!
	Review your site, make changes to the material, and re-publish the pages that have changed

Somewhere to Host the site

If you're getting an internet account yourselves, to allow you to browse the web and send and receive email, most service providers will offer you web space free. However, if you're not getting an account, you'll need to find someone to host your site.

A number of organisations offer free web space for voluntary groups. The drawback is that, since its dependent on their paying for it, the offer changes with levels of funding. If you're taking this up, either you should be paying a small charge so that you pay for your space, or you should look for a large, well-supported, stable non-profit-making body committed to long term provision of space for community groups.

Bodies who qualify at present in Milton Keynes are restricted to MK Web, as far as I know! mkweb is a consortium of public and private bodies who are funding the key site introducing Milton Keynes to the public, and they have the MK COIN directory of voluntary organisations on their site. They also offer what they call webverts - adverts on the web - which will allow organisations to create a very small website free. And they intend to be around for a very long time!

Publishing the Web Pages

The process of sending your web pages out onto the host site is called Publishing. This is done by FTP transfer of the pages from the computer where they've been created to the computer that will host them, and you'll need an FTP program to do it. Sometimes some changes have to be made, such as adding longer extensions to the filenames of certain pages, (and to the links from other pages to them) particularly if you have created them on Windows 3.11 machines. But on W95 machines, most pages can go straight onto your host site as they are.

To tell the computer where the pages have to go to, you'll need the FTP address of your website. This is not the same as the website address you quote to other people for browsing the site. And you'll need to know the password for that space too. Not everyone is allowed to put pages on your site and change them! You'll need to contact the provider of the host space to find out what the FTP address is. Very often there'll be a webpage on their site which will explain how to work it out once you know the site name.

Once you've got the information, the process of actually publishing is very much like moving files around on your own computer. Someone with an internet account and FTP software dials up, locates the correct site, gives the password, and uses FTP to copy the files to their host site.