# Buidling a web-site - help



## dedee (29 Jan 2004)

The gift of a digital camera at Xmas has prompted me to start looking at the some what daunting task of creating a web site. 

Initially I'd like to do this on the cheap. I do not pay an ISP for net access so I am looking for one of the freebie web-hosting services. I've tried to use the freeserve site but they restrict the picture size so much so that they are difficult to see.

Any recomendations for a free web hosting service that is simple (I do use MS frontpage and WSFTP so can cope with most techie things). 

Thanks
AndyP


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## Adam (29 Jan 2004)

Ask James (sawdustalley)

Have a look at hostlab.co.uk, then have a quiet word with SDA, and make loud coughing noises when the subject of price comes up :lol: :lol: :lol: 

Adam


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## Adam (29 Jan 2004)

I like you, am gearing up towards building a website - I've done a few, but have yet to get the nerve to sort through hundreds of images. I'm after a cheapie laptop, so I can sit in front of the TV, rather than hiding upstairs in the office for hours.


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## dedee (29 Jan 2004)

Adam,
Thanks I am sure Hostlab's rates are cvery competitive but I am not at all sure I want to comit money at this point. 

Perhaps if they offereed a free trial period, long enought to see if one could cope with the setting up of the website, before charging for the service I might take the plunge. 

By the way most of my web access is from work and I do publish & set up pages on the corporate intranet. If something goes wrong here support is free and instant. I'd hate to have to cope on my own if things started to go wrong especially from home on a 56k modem.

AndyP


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## Alf (29 Jan 2004)

Andy,

As long as you don't mind the (fairly limited) advertising, then Geocities isn't bad. No good if you want to hotlink to images though; it doesn't like that. I found 0catch got too bogged down with pop-ups after I'd been with them for a while, although it was okay initially. I may yet return to Geocities, simply because my free ISP space just doesn't get included in search engines  

Cheers, Alf


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## Adam (29 Jan 2004)

I have a Geocities account I use for bits and bobs.

If you look in the FAQ somwhere, you can upload direct from Microsoft Frontpage - eliminating the ws_FTP or whatever program you use. It does approx the same thing anyway (FTP) but it seems to work OK for uploads.



Adam


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## Charley (29 Jan 2004)

Andy, I'm just about to get rid of my web server so I can offer you any free space but I'm sure if you have a word with James he'll do you a good deal or another good cheap webhost (well so I've been told) is 34sp.com


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## Chris Knight (29 Jan 2004)

Andy,
By far the biggest investment in a website is your own time and some hosts seem to value this at nothing. Some provide all sorts of tools and so forth that can help you a lot, others offer no support are slow etc. and picking a host is made difficult because they go up and down in terms of service quality over time. 

Whatever you choose try to pick one that does not limit you on standard fare and has good response times - try looking at sites that it hosts - are they quick? Is there a good diversty of sites? Check their forums for users' complaints - is there praise or are there brickbats?

Don't pick a UK host just because you live here. If most of your hoped for readership is in the UK it may be worth picking a USA host because they will be less busy at UK peak hours.

You may noy want it now but look for their offerings in the number of databases, email addresses and so forth that they allow. Do they allow shell access and so forth? 

Most hosts are Unix/Linux orientated - you would have to be a masochist to choose anything else because so much free stuff only works properly on the Unix/Linux servers.

Make sure your site is designed in such a way that it is transportable if you need to change hosts. If you opt for a free host and use their web-building tools you may find this difficult.

As an ex-FrontPage user I would suggest that you stay away from using FP if you can. It does have some handy features but it also bloats pages incredibly and if you use its publishing features you end up with a zillion files you don't need on the server. In its retail form, Dreamweaver is very expensive but you can pick up second hand copies reasonably and this is without doubt the King Kong of web-authoring packages


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## dedee (30 Jan 2004)

Thanks all for the replies and advise. 

I've had a quick play with geocities using FP and their file manager which I prefer to the pagebuilder program.

Working for a large IT company has spoilt me. I can create pages and include hyperlinks and images either in MSword or FP. When it comes to loading them to the web page (Community is the term we use) I just select the one file which automatically picks up all the linked files and whisks them away. Imagine my horry then when I discovered that to get my images displayed in geocities I had to not only upload the images sperately but I had to edit the HTML to the name of my geocities URL/filename as well - this is hard work.

I've got a couple of test pages up and will persevere. I will keep the FP pages plain and simple just text, images and the links to other pages which should keep file size and qty down to a minimum.

AndyP


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## Adam (30 Jan 2004)

. Imagine my horry then when I discovered that to get my images displayed in geocities I had to not only upload the images sperately but I had to edit the HTML to the name of my geocities URL/filename as well - this is hard work. 
#

This is not correct, are you setup for direct links rather than relative links?
You need "relative" links, so it doesn't matter the exact path to the images, provided you upload the directory structure as per the harddrive you created it on- - thenm you don't have to manually edit any links whatsoever!!!

Adam


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## Adam (30 Jan 2004)

FInally sorted out most of my WW related images - in preperation of a website - I have 800+ images, of workshops, jigs, projects etc, which is over 1GB of images ;-(

I need to start batch processing them for the web size!!

Adam


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## dedee (30 Jan 2004)

Adam

_This is not correct, are you setup for direct links rather than relative links? 
You need "relative" links, so it doesn't matter the exact path to the images, provided you upload the directory structure as per the harddrive you created it on- - thenm you don't have to manually edit any links whatsoever!!! _

You've got me there. I am using the geocities file manager to upload the files. There does not seem to be a direct link option.

Andy


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## Adam (30 Jan 2004)

I think this option should be in the software package you are using to create the HTML, not on geocities upload manager.

Cut and pasted from a google search:

Relative Pathnames Versus Absolute Pathnames
You can link to documents in other directories by specifying the relative path from the current document to the linked document. For example, a link to a file NYStats.html located in the subdirectory AtlanticStates would be: 

<A HREF="AtlanticStates/NYStats.html">New York</A>

These are called relative links because you are specifying the path to the linked file relative to the location of the current file. You can also use the absolute pathname (the complete URL) of the file, but relative links are more efficient in accessing a server. They also have the advantage of making your documents more "portable" -- for instance, you can create several web pages in a single folder on your local computer, using relative links to hyperlink one page to another, and then upload the entire folder of web pages to your web server. The pages on the server will then link to other pages on the server, and the copies on your hard drive will still point to the other pages stored there. 

It is important to point out that UNIX is a case-sensitive operating system where filenames are concerned, while DOS and the MacOS are not. For instance, on a Macintosh, "DOCUMENT.HTML", "Document.HTML", and "document.html" are all the same name. If you make a relative hyperlink to "DOCUMENT.HTML", and the file is actually named "document.html", the link will still be valid. But if you upload all your pages to a UNIX web server, the link will no longer work. Be sure to check your filenames before uploading. 

Pathnames use the standard UNIX syntax. The UNIX syntax for the parent directory (the directory that contains the current directory) is "..". (For more information consult a beginning UNIX reference text such as Learning the UNIX Operating System from O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.) 

If you were in the NYStats.html file and were referring to the original document US.html, your link would look like this: 

<A HREF="../US.html">United States</A>

In general, you should use relative links whenever possible because: 
it's easier to move a group of documents to another location (because the relative path names will still be valid) 
it's more efficient connecting to the server 
there is less to type 
However, use absolute pathnames when linking to documents that are not directly related. For example, consider a group of documents that comprise a user manual. Links within this group should be relative links. Links to other documents (perhaps a reference to related software) should use absolute pathnames instead. This way if you move the user manual to a different directory, none of the links would have to be updated. 

URLs


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## dedee (30 Jan 2004)

Whoa - Adam

Thanks for taking the time but this is way over my head. I am using MS FrontPage and can find no reference to relative nor absolute links. Also the geocities only seems to allow individual files and not folders to be uploaded.

Thanks again
Andy


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## Adam (30 Jan 2004)

I've got frontpage at home somewhere, so I'll look it up for you, if you don't hear in a couple of days, give me a nudge or private_message me.

I'll go have a look at Geocities, as I'm sure you are doing it the hard way. You should be able to click something, either in FP or Geocities and it should suck up your entire site, including picutres and directories and you don't have to use that difficult "upload" manager they have. Effectively "one-click" upload. I have done this in the past, so know it's possible.

Adam

The stuff about relative vs absolute links a bit more simplified is

imagine linking to a picture on your hard drive

e.g.

C:\woodwork\photos\workshop.jpg

If you are creating a website rather than point to that image - which Geocities can't "see" as its on your harddrive and hence you have to edit the code. So.....you point your HTML to a relative link e.g.

<current_directoy>\photos\workshop.jpg

This means no matter where the files are, they are still, relative to the current directory, in a directry called "photo" which is in the current directory, and in it, is a photo called workshop.jpg

Does that make sense?

Adam


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## Adam (30 Jan 2004)

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/geo/frontpage/

You need to read this: (above)

Look like it doesn't support Frontpage '98 any more

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/geo/front ... ge-07.html

How do I publish from FrontPage 2000? 
You can still publish to your GeoCities Pro site using FrontPage 2000.
From within FrontPage 2000, follow these steps: 

In the File menu, click on "Publish Web." 
In the "Specify the location to publish your web to" box, type in your URL: http://yourdomain.com 
Click on "Options." 
Specify whether you want to publish only pages that have changed or all pages. 
Click on "Publish." 
Note: Please see the following if you keep receiving a user name or password prompt. 

Please be advised that you should not use FrontPage 2000 in combination with FTP. 

We do not currently support any other versions of FrontPage including FrontPage 98. 

That any use?

Adam


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## dedee (30 Jan 2004)

Adam, I am doing all this from work (I do not have much to do) so will not view the forum or paly with geocities again until Monday.

Thanks for your help. I do understand the links business but not how to get that to work with the FP/Geocities combination. Don't spend too much time on this unless you are really bored. For my purposes creating half a dozen linked pages with images and narrative attached is not too bad now I understand the logic.

Perhaps the facilities of which you speak are only available on the paid for services, Geocities Pro is a subscription service, I am using the freebie.

I have just tried the FP publish web option and I get an error message
_"Server could not complete request. Contact ISP or web service administrator to make sure that the server has the front page server extensions installed"_
This could be caused by the firewall the the company here uses.

Andy


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## Adam (30 Jan 2004)

I suspect that since I did this, Geocities have changed this to being availabel only in their "paid" subscription.

The relative bit is simple, 

f you have a page in a directory called "website" or whatever, and in that is a directory called "images", then use link like below. I think anyway!
<a href=images/woodwork.jpg">


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