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Building a Web Site
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Assemble the Goods
Paragraph 1 - Who will look at it, Love?
Paragraph 2 - Organising the Storage Folder
Paragraph 3 - What makes a site great?
Paragraph 4 - Dynamic programming
Paragraph 5 - Building up Archives
Paragraph 6 - What about the updates?
Paragraph 7 - Does my Opening Page still look Fresh?
Paragraph 8 - Special Events


Who will look at it, Love?
That question is meant to be a dampener. In my case the answer was - very few of our Parish, and wonderful visitors from other nations. See my Links page for the ones who started me off.
Then we got a new Rector, and my Website became his Introduction to our six centres.

Webmasters may well visit your site because of the skills they can learn from you, so we do our best. We may even produce a result pleasing to Our Lord. Getting it right for Him is my personal aim. Other criticisms only help.

Organising the Storage Folder
Computer management is difficult. I have rearranged my entire site, and went to the length of changing my Geocities address, in order to get my folders tidy.
My main or Home folder contains a folder for each of the following pages - Home, Heritage, Organisation, Centres, St Johns, St Luke, St Mark, St Margaret, All Saints and Nangiloc. That way the images used on each page are placed in the folder named for their page.
I was enthusiastic about the Stained Glass windows in St Marks, so the small images are in one folder, and the large images in another. Our Magazine has a folder, so do these pages on Building a Web Site. The Diary, or Special Events pages are still to be invented.
Now I see my errors, the navigation is too busy, so the pages for each Topic are being grouped, and I now have a page called Site Plan.

What makes a site great?
Patrick Lynch in 2001 wrote a book <"a href+'http://www.webstyleguide.com/">Web Style Guide" where he asks 'Are your pages upside down?' - he means my page header takes up too much space. Then Future Now, in one of his Newsletters, suggests we give word of mouth an active role on our website. Include a "Tell A Friend" option on your site, enabling your happy visitors to send your url to others. This is a copy of their Newsletter visit grokdotcom to see what is this week's topic - It's the reader, Grasshopper.

Dynamic programming
By dynamic, I mean the site changes when the viewer interacts.
The links on this page glow (turn green when your mouse hovers over them) by using CSS (cascading style sheets), but it only works with IE4+
Top ten signs you are an amateur - too many different tricks used on the page, or look at 'The Rookie Mistakes' (this search engine reference gave me Theme park visits) first.
Uncle Jim at Web Site Designs suggests we add games. See Javascript for more games. And to add to our choices, some of us use Browsers like Mozilla which do not support badly written code.

Building up Archives
I am finding forward planning needs thought. It is hard to look ahead to when the present pages are out of date, but still have good facts. It is not as easy as just another bookcase in the lounge.
David Walker's Lighthouse series had lots of articles on design trying to become Web adjusted. To quote his Jakob Nielsen utterance, the average Web user is not on the page she wants to be on. He has now changed direction - duelling browser-makers mean some pages do not present evenly in all browsers. He has decided that simple and functional is better, after all the hype.

What about the updates?
Because the Internet is all digital surface, appearances are very powerful. The mere look of your website can say volumes about your church. So what better way to signal one's spiritual legitimacy than by integrating the newest design innovation into your website?

Who is running your page - technology or the Visitors?

Does my Opening Page still look Fresh?
Leo Klein in his page Web Design and Sin, comments that the irony is that the medium is so new and the goalposts so much in flux that hard-and-fast rules are hard to come by.

Now I will use the last words from David Strom (whose web site is now 'members only'. Take a minimalist approach to your Web site, and keep it mean, lean and clean. You can design a great site and still have simple text navigation links and plain backgrounds.

Start of Button trick
From Web Site: www.jdstiles.com ([email protected])
1. White or very pale background. No background images.
2. Use TABLES to create columns.
3. Do not show a Visitor counter.
4. Finish the page before you link to it.
5. Keep the overhead costs low.
6. Learn HTML, and stay in control.

Sorry - Trick only works on Microsoft IE4 +.

Special Events
Work out which special events happen every year (e.g. Christmas, Easter, children's summer holiday club, etc.) and then create a page for each of those events. Upload those pages to your website now, so that they can be indexed by the search engines in good time.

Of course, you probably don't yet have most of the information you need for these pages. But it is still easy to write something based on what happened last year, and you can always go back and fill in the details nearer to the time. For example on a Christmas page you could write:

Each Christmas we have a number of special services to celebrate the birth of Jesus. You would be very welcome to come to our traditional Carol service, or if you have children they may enjoy our fun Nativity service. For further details please visit this page again nearer to the time, or contact us.
If you can include comments from people about how much they enjoyed the event last year, or photos, then so much the better.

Remember that you need to create a link from the rest of your website to each of the pages you have written, otherwise they won't be indexed by the search engines. The easiest way to do this is to have a "diary" or "what's on" page, and then list them as "forthcoming events".


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Web Address    http://www.geocities.com/mallee2007
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