More Web Questions

[Parker]

Hi all.  I'm currently in the midst of setting up a website for me, and I had a couple of questions I was wondering.  First of all, I'm planning to use GoDaddy for the hosting, but that's just because it's the only company I know.  Are they good?  Should I look elsewhere?  As I  look at their site, I notice a slew of options--what should I go with?

Linux or Windows-based--what's the difference?
How much disc space?  How much data transfer?  I don't anticipate hordes of people invading my domain, so is 5GB space and 250 GB transfer plenty?

I don't know--there are way too many options listed.  I can upgrade later if I need to, right?  What are the essentials I need to know before I go in to this?

I've done some dabbling with html, and I'm going to pick up Dreamweaver 8--is it worth it to get the entire Studio 8?  Since I'm a student, it's $180 vs. $280 (Dreamweaver alone vs. Studio).  Are there any manuals/guides for those programs ya'll would recommend?

Obviously I'm clueless.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Sprig likes GoDaddy. I've been very satisfied with their service, but the hosting package just wasn't what I was looking for (IE, an inexpensive way to host multiple domains that pointed at different sites). They're a good company, and I'm happy to recommend them both in terms of the actual product and customer support. The standard space and bandwidth you mentioned should be sufficient for what you are describing.

Linux vs. Windows: unless you're doing code that needs to use OS apps (like ImageMagick, NetPBM, or Zip apps) it probably doesn't matter even if you know which one you have. Most apps that web programmers need are available for both platforms anyway. I'm not a Linux geek, but if you have no preference, go with Linux, since that would cost less for GoDaddy to use, and that would keep costs down, which theoretically get passed to you eventually.

As far as software, You don't need the whole studio unless you a) have $100 to spare, or b) have a purpose in mind for more than two of the programs. Dreamweaver should be plenty.

Personally I prefer to code by hand. I don't like WYSIWYG editors. I guess that's a secret Luddite coming out of me. Anyway, I use Crimson Editor because it does the color code thing for about a billion languages, not just HTML. plus it's free. It is not, however, a WYSIWYG editor. Of the WYSIWYGs I've used, I think Dreamweaver is probably my favorite. So I can at least tell you it's worth getting.

[Spriggan]

I'll be happy to give you a full run down of anything if you want to grab me sometime on IM or later on today on the forum if you have more questions.

I agree with pretty much SE said, Godaddy is a good company and has some of the best customer service around, heck on time with my website (where EUOL's stuff is hosted) they called me because there was some exploitable PHP code somewhere that they noticed a bot trying to break so they deactivated that page, called me then helped me fix the problem. 

The main difference between Linux and windows is what coding environment do you want?  .NET or LAMP, both are free, both require programming know how and outside of that at the level you'll buy there's no difference.  If all you want is static XHTML pages then it doesn't matter.

As for WYSIWYG, Microsoft Expression is hands down the best one for just XHTML/CSS, its much more accurate then Dreamweaver--So much so it surprised many of the anti-WYSIWYG people in the web community.  The beta I used didn't support PHP though which is a downside if the full versions doesn't.  And as for Studio 8, the only thing in that package that's worth getting outside of DW is Flash so If you're not going to be using that then don't bother, take that $100 and by Photoshop elements if you don't already have an image editor.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Parker,

1and1.com seems to have really good prices for the bandwidth/space. I have an account there (they had a 3-years-free special), but I've never gotten around to using it. However, John Scalzi uses them to host his domain, and he's had nothing but praise. When his BaconCat blog entry got farked, he called them up to warn them, and they were like "Whatever." Their backbone connection is apparently really good.

[Parker]

Thanks for the advice, all.  I went with 1and1 hosting--I hadn't even heard of it before Ookla pointed it out.  And then I managed to get Adobe Creative Suite 2--with Dreamweaver 8 and Acrobat 8--for $200, so I went with that, too.  If anyone's interested, you can watch my progress at www.brycemoore.com, though I have to warn you that it's very much a work in progress (only really works reliably in Firefox so far, for instance), and I won't be promoting it much until it's more fleshed out.  Thanks again for the tips--I'll probably be back with more questions later.

[Spriggan]

1and1 isn't a bad host, I almost went with them myself but godaddy had a better price on the features I wanted at the time.

If you want help/suggestions on your website I'm more then happy to help but I'll be quite blunt/criticle on things that I don't think are working but I'll give you several ideas on how to do things so you can build your site to your needs.

[Parker]

So here's another question.  What resolution should I design for?  800 by 600?  1024 by 768?  I found some statistics that said only 17% of users were still using 800 by 600 as of July 2006, but I don't want to alienate any users.  Any advice?  I was trying to do everything to scale (by percentages instead of pixels), but then I had trouble getting everything to work in all the different browsers.  Tips on that?

[Spriggan]

1024x768

I think about 75% of users are on that resolution so there's not much reason to go for 800x600 unless that fits your design better, just place the less important items on the right hand side that you don't mind getting possibly cut off (ie off screen).

Doing a fluid website, one that's all % based, can be quite hard but doable.  You're going to have to dump table and use CSS to affect everything's (including text) width and height (though to be honest you're really designing 1024 or 800 since most websites don't care about height now days).  And then, if you're trying to do a truly fluid site, use Javascript to detect the user's resolution then changing all the image resolutions to match.

You can also use JS to assign different CSS sheets based off of resolution so you can use absolute values in your CSS instead of percentages.

Also, depending on the complexity of your CSS, you'll need possibly 3 different CSS pages: one for IE6 one for IE7 and one for everything else.  You can use IE's conditional statements to assign all this.  It's a lot to chew on, that's why most people don't bother with changing resolutions.

[Parker]

Yikes.  That's more than I'm ready to handle at this fledgling stage.  I've figured a bit of a workaround for now--I just have to finish toying around with it.  The more I work on this, the more I think I'm just going to have to do something for now, and then hone my skills and put up a new and improved site later on.  Is that too much of a pain when later on comes?

[Spriggan]

no it's not, unless you're dealing with databases and decide to redeisgn that structure.  In fact many 1st generation websites are put up there with the idea that after a few months they can asses what parts are working and what aren't then use that to affect the redesign though that's not the recommended method (it's always best to do the most professional job you can but you're never going to get it perfect the first time).  But since you're doing this for fun and not actually a business those things don't really matter, what matters is you enjoy doing it and learn from the experience.

[Parker]

Alright--I've got a bare bones site up and running, and I'm now working on adding content to it.  If anyone has suggestions/criticisms for the look, please do tell.  Also, I was wondering how hard it is to get a blog in your own page, instead of having to use a premade page as I'm doing right now.  I'd rather have the whole thing look consistent, and as it is right now, if you click on "blog," it takes you to a page that looks very different.  Suggestions?  Or is it just a really big pain?

[Nessa]

You can look at mine. I made my own 'blog', and my brother added a feature for comments. You need PHP or some other fancy code stuff to do things like on your existing blog site.

That is all I know.

<--PHP and fancy code know-nothing.

[Spriggan]

If you have a database and php or ASP then you can have non-static pages on your site.  Two popular options are wordpress, you can just download and install the blog on your site (and is the more powerful of the two) or you can mirror a blogger account (you can set it up to send your site the updates, kind of weird).

http://wordpress.org/hosting/

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=55373&topic=8911

One of the nice things about using either is that if you have office 2007 you can publish to your blog directly from Word with a single click or you can also use Windows Live Writer like EUOL does.
http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=4372c8c2-b76f-4d44-aea1-9835b61d8dc1

[Spriggan]

So I've decided to get back into the personal website thingy again and am resurrecting MonkeySloth, this time as a shorter name and a .net instead of .com, and figured I'd go over the steps I make in doing a website.  Since I'm going to have a blog at Monkeysloth I'll probably cover Brandon’s site redesign as well as the actual making there, but I'm a few days off of actually having anything at that URL so I'm going to post here for now.

One of the nice things about going over the process I take when designing/developing a website with something like MonkeySloth is that since the site itself is so simple and not very deep it can be used as an introductory example.  There are only currently 3 main sections and aside from the blog the other 2 are rather simple in design.

Steps Spriggan follows:

1)   Examine the website- What currently works, what doesn’t and why?
2)   Get reader feed back on the website – ask what they want or like
3)   Use the results from steps 1 and 2 to create a revision list that adds new features and things that should be fixed
4)   Create user profiles –help in making sure that the needs of the readers get addressed
5)   Create a style guide—what labels are you going to use, make sure all the words on the site are consistent.  This doesn’t deal with the look of the site, just the words use on it like categories, menus, ect. 
6)   Develop a sitemap to show the basic structure and flow of a website – What page leads where and why
7)   Test the sitemap with the User Profiles to make sure the organization works for the test cases involved.  And if needed go back to step 5 or 6 and repeat.
   Create a Flowchart of all the function/features of the site, this is detailed chart that shows all the steps and processes needed to complete a task.
9)   Create a wireframe of each page using all the information generated from steps 5-8.  This is the first time you deal with what goes where on a page
10)   Test the wireframe with the test cases developed in step 4 and if needed real people, make sure things are easy to find, labels are clear and tasks are intuitive. Repeat until satisfied.
11)   Create a site for testing – Like using the wireframe to test have people test this site for usability, not heavy on graphics something simple that can be changed easily.  Repeat until satisfied.
12)    Build the final site or finish fleshing out the site built in step 11.

Sine this is a new site from scratch I don’t have to do the first few steps which are related to redesign more then anything, though having user profiles never hurt but they’re harder to create if you haven’t done research and I’m not going to bother with them with this site.

So I’m starting with step 3, create a revision list that adds new features and things that should be fixed, but only listing out what I want to have on the site since again there isn’t an original site.  So my list is quite simple:
1)   Blog
2)   Links to sites I’ve worked on or currently do
3)   Links to other sites
4)   About MonkeySloth
5)   Contact
6)   Sitemap

Nothing too fancy, so since I’m skipping step 4 I’m moving on to step 5 which is the style guide which is more or less categorizing things, how are these things going to be labeled and organized?  I’m going to keep Blog as blog, no real reason to change that, if you don’t have a good reason to (which there rarely are) it’s best not to use funky/cute/creative names for things that confuse your reader.  The links section I’m thinking of taking both and combining it into one page and just calling it “sites” since I hate the word/term “links” though I might have to change this if that label isn’t clear/effective enough.  About will be labeled the same I think, I’m going to have information about the Monkey Sloth—fake of course—and info about me probably.  Lastly contact and sitemap are staying the same, something at the bottom of the page in the footer that needs to be there.

I'll post the next steps once I've done them if there's intrest.