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- Creating Your Website
The Past
The Present
"Nuts and Bolts"
The Past
Several years ago, the standards for
corporate web sites were:
To inform the public of the services and products offered by the
corporation;
To display an offline means of contact, such as a telephone number, a
fax number, and a postal address;
To provide a Frequently Asked Questions web page so that the public
would know h how to interact with the company;
To provide pictures that would help the public relate to the size of the
company, the principals involved, and the types of products and services provided.
The Present
Today, the standards have dramatically increased for a professional
presence online. Corporate web sites are now being evaluated as a medium for generating
income, instead of a medium just for advertising. The corporation whose web sites evolve
to this new level will expand their possibilities for new sources of revenue and
profitability.
Raising the expectations of your web site will also provide the
competitive edge needed when new technologies become standardized. New technologies such
as broadband (high speed internet access) will allow companies to provide e-commerce
services that are impossible today. Is your company ready to respond when these
technological advances occur?
Finally, successful online companies know that developing web sites is
more than creating web pages: it is a way of doing business. AlterCom offers business as
well as technological expertise which will allow your company to integrate daily business
procedures with online e-commerce.
"Nuts and Bolts"
Hardware
Your desktop computer may be made by Dell, Compaq, Packard Bell, etc. You may have a suite
of programs such as Microsoft Office, or Corel Wordperfect running on an operating system
which may be Microsoft Windows, Apple, Linux, etc.
In comparison, altercom.com offers web hosting services on Sun
Microsystems Sparc servers (which are often rated highest in quality and dependability,)
running the Apache Web server program (rated as the #1 web server program in the world)
which offers a suite of internet programs, running on Solaris 2.6 (a form of the UNIX
operating system) which happens to be the same operating system on which the internet was
developed, thereby providing over twenty years of compatibility and stability for activity
conducted on the internet.
Software
Instead of using a word processor to create documents, there are three methods to create
web pages.
Some of the latest word processing programs will save your documents as
web pages, by saving them in a documentname.htm or documentname.html format.
This works well for documents that are basically text, but the programs have difficulty
aligning text and graphics to your satisfaction.
There are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web development
programs such as Microsoft Front Page, Netscape Composer, Allaire's Cold Fusion, etc.
These programs are designed to combine text and graphics for web development so that you
do not have to know HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) programming. The limitation to these
programs is that they add a lot of unneeded programming which makes it very hard to edit
if you want to fine tune the look of your web pages.
- The third way to develop web pages takes some initiative and time on your part. You can
use an HTML Editing program like Hot Dog that does some programming for you if you want,
but you are also able to edit the programming manually to fine tune the look of your web
pages. What takes time and initiative learning the HTML programming language. Basic HTML
for designing text and graphics is as simple as adding "Tags" around text to
dictate the appearance of the text in your web browser. For example, typing: altercom
sets the word "altercom" in bold type. If you are interested in a step by step
guide to learning HTML, you may go to:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html or
http://www.useractive.com/main2/
Graphics Design
The two most common types of graphics files are *.jpg files and *.gif files. *.jpg
(pronounced "jaypeg") files are used for high resolution graphics such as
photographs. *.gif files (pronounced as "gif") are used for artistic graphics
such as company logos, web site buttons, etc.
Graphics are developed in three ways:
- You can scan hard copy pictures and graphics and save them as *.jpg or *.gif files,
- you can create digital pictures (*.jpg files) by using a digital camera or having your
photo processor create your pictures in a digital format, or
- you can create digital graphics (*.gif files) by using software programs such as Paint
Shop Pro.
Creating web compatible graphics is a profession unto itself. For
additional information on creating graphics, you may go to:
http://www.angelswebgraphics.com/grfxtut.htm
After your graphic development is completed, the next step is to align the
graphics within your web pages. There are several HTML tags that provide simple alignemnt
of graphics with text, but for a more profssional look, most developers use HTML Tables to
design their sites.
HTML tables are used to align text and images in the same manner as tables
and frames are used in word processing programs. You may place graphics and text within
HTML Table cells, define the placement and size of the cells, and thereby create a more
professional look for your web site. HTML Tables are not the complete answer to placement
of text and graphics, there are many other "tricks of the trade" that are used
to align text and graphics even down to the pixel level. If you are interested in a more
involved look at web site development, you may go to: http://w3.org/
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