need suggestions and tips

Nathan · **Posted:** Sun Sep 17, 2006 3:16 pm

Hello all,

I need some suggestions and tips from those that are experianced in running/designing websites. The last week I have been heavily in the study of learning my HTML. I understand the basics of it and I have been making a few test runs on my "Notepad". My goal is to create the website offline first. That way I can get everything right and test things out. I still got a ways to go. I am going to call my site Pacific-aircraft.com. It will be a sister site to us-aircraft and j-aircraft.com. The Pacific war has always been my main interest. I plan to have the site geared more toward the history side of things. But I am also going to make it for the modeler too. I will also gear heavily towards book reviews. Since there are already many sites devoted to model kit reviews and such.

I am going to try and keep things simple. The main things on my site are going to be:

-Whats New
-A Book Review section
-Model gallery
-and links.

Anyway, I just wondered if anyone could give me some advice or tips on running a website.

Thanks,
Nathan

Scott Rose · **Posted:** Mon Sep 18, 2006 5:52 am

My biggest piece of advice is find a good host and focus on content over wiz-bang visuals. Once you have the content you can make it look pretty, but if you have little content, beautifully presented then you will have few repeat visitors.

As for a host, I use Website Sourceand have been very happy with them.

bomberflight · **Posted:** Mon Sep 18, 2006 7:21 am

Hi Nathan ~ Scott's advice is spot on !

Keep it simple ~ Don't be too ambitious to begin with ~ Have a plan for making it sustainable over time ( content / new content / more new content )

Long term its vital to have a goal for the site ~ and then to stick to the plan.

No one is likely to read 200 pages ~ however great the content ~ and it will become too big to manage ~ this is one occassion where less can be more .......

Good luck with the project and have fun !

treadigraph · **Posted:** Mon Sep 18, 2006 7:21 am

Clear and simple navigation is essential - do make sure that your visitors can easily reach any part of the site from any other within just a couple of clicks... I get bored following a whole series of links to (hopefully) eventually reach what I want to know.

Good luck with it, it's good fun creating a class site!

mrhenniger · **Posted:** Mon Sep 18, 2006 11:06 am

All good advice so far.

One propblem I stumbled over early on with Aerial Visuals (www.AerialVisuals.ca) is depending on which service you use it may or may not be case sensitive with file names. I would recommend you standardize on one case for all file name extentions for the files themselves and in the code. That way you will avoid wasting much time figuring out what is wrong when you try and load a page and some pictures don't appear while others do. For example go with all ".jpg" or all ".JPG".

Mike

treadigraph · **Posted:** Mon Sep 18, 2006 4:17 pm

I agree with Mike - I stick to lower case and also avoid any spaces in file names and folder structure - use underscores such as my_site and keep sub-folders and file names as short but meaningful as possible.

Nathan · **Posted:** Mon Sep 18, 2006 5:23 pm

Thanks everyone for the great advice. I will stay true and write down what you all have said. Keep it clean, simple, with good content. They are all important. It means a lot to me that you all took the time to give me some pointers. I will do my best to help keep history alive. Without history we would not know how to get through the next day.

Thanks again!

Your Friend,
Nathan

Scott Rose · **Posted:** Tue Sep 19, 2006 5:39 am

mrhenniger wrote:

All good advice so far.

One propblem I stumbled over early on with Aerial Visuals (www.AerialVisuals.ca) is depending on which service you use it may or may not be case sensitive with file names. I would recommend you standardize on one case for all file name extentions for the files themselves and in the code. That way you will avoid wasting much time figuring out what is wrong when you try and load a page and some pictures don't appear while others do. For example go with all ".jpg" or all ".JPG".

Mike

Good point Mike, also, standardize .htm or .html, either one works but if you put index.html in your code and call the file index.htm then it will not work.

RyanShort1 · **Posted:** Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:44 am

Also, if you are trying to do things quickly, it can be helpful to have a quick editor such as NVU which is freely available.

Ryan

Paul Krumrei · **Joined:** Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:06 pm **Posts:** 1757

Go buy Frontpage 2003.

This is probably the best HTML editor out there. MY sites are completley built with Frontpage and Visual Studio 2005.

-Make navigation consistant within the pages.
-When adding links to OTHER sites, use the _blank tag, this will create a new pop up page and will still have the users stay on your site, so they dont wander off.

-worry about content first and graphics later.
-UPDATE IT!! and OFTEN! I hate sites that dont update stuff, it is boring and visitors will not come back.

-add google search functionality to your site. This will allow people to search your website.

-add a section on every page on how to contact you.

- start a page and finish it. Dont half-a$$ start a page and put it up. People get bored.

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