HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
What will you put on your home page?
Because the home page is the starting point for the rest of the information in your
website, consider what sort of information you're going to put on the home page.
A blog? A general summary of what's to come? A list of links to other topics?
Whatever you put on the home page, make sure that it's compelling enough so that
members of your intended audience want to stick around.
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What are your goals?
As you design the framework for your website, keep your goals in mind, and make
sure that you aren't obscuring your goals with extra information or content.
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TIP
Several utilities and packages can assist you in storyboarding.
Foremost among them are site-management packages that can
help you manage links in a site, view a graphical representation of
the relationship of documents in your site, move documents
around, and automatically update all relevant links in and to the
documents. This type of functionality is often provided by content-
management applications for websites.
At some point, you'll want to move the websites you create from your local computer to
a server on the Internet. Before doing so, you have to decide exactly what kind of hosting
arrangement you want. The simplest approach is to get a Web hosting account that
enables you to upload your HTML files, images, style sheets, and other web content to a
server that's visible on the Web. This approach enables you to easily create web pages
(and websites) locally and publish them on the server without making changes to them.
Using a Content-Management Application
The other option is to use an application to publish content on the Web. This can make
more sense if your idea for a website falls into an existing category with publishing tools
available for it. For example, if you want to publish a blog, you can use sites like
TypePad
(http://typepad.com/)
, Blogger
(http://blogger.com)
, WordPress
(http://word-
press.com/),
Tumblr (
http://tumblr.com)
or Posterous
(http://posterous.com),
among
many others. The advantage of these applications is that it's easy to set up a site, pick a
theme, and start publishing content on the Web through a web interface. There's no need
to build the web pages by hand, set up a hosting account, or even deal with editing files
by hand.
