Creating a website (tips for potters?)

When I look at some of your websites (e.g. Shambala etc) I get envious
at just a great way of reaching the public and sharing works with
fellow potters. But I don't have a clue how to make one (a website
that is) and don't have the dough to pay someone.

I know there must be a zillion books on this, but I thought maybe
someone here could point me to a short, very basic "how-to" article on
the subject.

By the way, thank you to the poster who suggested I use the google
access to this newsgroup rather than AOL. Much easier to navigate
around!

Thanks
Eric
SpunMud Pottery

"Eric" wrote in message
oups.com...
When I look at some of your websites (e.g. Shambala etc) I get envious
at just a great way of reaching the public and sharing works with
fellow potters. But I don't have a clue how to make one (a website
that is) and don't have the dough to pay someone.

I know there must be a zillion books on this, but I thought maybe
someone here could point me to a short, very basic "how-to" article on
the subject.

By the way, thank you to the poster who suggested I use the google
access to this newsgroup rather than AOL. Much easier to navigate
around!

Thanks
Eric
SpunMud Pottery

Making a web page is actually fairly simple. You just need to learn some
formatting code and for that all you need to do is read some help files that
are available on the net. If you come across a SIMPLE (KiSS - keep it
simple stupid - sorry nothing personal here) web page that you like (nothing
with scrolling text, flashing pictures, etc.), right click on the page and
click on the option 'view page source'. It may look like Greek but it is
really fairly simple. Just remember that like a sentence there are rules.
You start a sentence with a capital letter. You end the sentence with a
period. If you have text you want to be a certain size then you start with
a font. When you are done with that font then you close with /font.

You can get html editors but it is really better if you learn to do the
coding yourself first with a simple text editor like notepad so that you can
learn to debug errors when you get them. You can get space to build your
page for as little as $5 a month. They will have a way to upload your code
and probably help for creating a page.

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.html-html.com/

I did mine with Frontpage software. It's a very simple software and I think you
can pick it up pretty cheaply on ebay.
It's pretty much menu drive, and you don't need to learn HTML.
It converts what you type into HTML; and it's about a tenth the cost of having
someone build you a website.
There are also free web site softwares like Hot Dog, I think. Just use a search
engine like Google and use the search term "free web site software". That
should bring up some possibilities.

Good luck!
June
http://www.angelfire.com/art2/shambhalapottery/

Sorry, but I can't stop myself!

Using font tags is absolutely not the way to write a website!

font is deprecated - that means that browsers will likely not use it
to determine the font properties in a couple of years. What happens now
is that the content (your text and images) is separated from the style
(your colours, or "color" in web-world, and positioning). This is called
CSS it makes sites very easy to play around with and alter.

A simple site looks like this:

html
headtitle/title
style type="text/css" media="all"
/* this is what dictates how stuff looks it's the CSS, it often goes in
a separate file so that many pages can use the same style, that way
changing the CSS file changes the look of the whole site, clever! */

body {background
url('http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/cam/British%20Museum/Pot%20pot..jpg')
50% 50% repeat; }
p {background: pink; color: blue; font-size: 1.2em; }
div {background: white; border: 1px blue solid ;}
h1 {font-size: x-large; }

/style

/head
body

h1My amazing pot page/h1
div
pThis is some amazing pot,eh! img src="mypot.jpg" alt="a picture of
my pot" //p
pThat's all except this list:/p
ul
lifirst item/li
liand then maybe a a href="linkedPage.htm" title="a link
somewhere"/li
/ul
/div
/body

---end of web page source ---------

The bits in and are called tags, they say what structural elements
of the page you are inserting. The style bits refer to these, eg pis a
new paragraph/p. "p {color: red;}" in the style section tells it to
make all text in all paragraphs red.

HTH, it might give you something to work from anyway. If you don't want
to get into all of this finding a decent WYSIWYG editor (that works just
like a wordprocessor) is a good idea. Sorry I always hand code so I
can't really recommend anything, unless you use Linux??

Cheers

pbhj

http://alicious.com

jedi wrote:
You end the sentence with a
period. If you have text you want to be a certain size then you start with
a font. When you are done with that font then you close with /font.

You can get html editors but it is really better if you learn to do the
coding yourself first with a simple text editor like notepad so that you can
learn to debug errors when you get them. You can get space to build your
page for as little as $5 a month. They will have a way to upload your code
and probably help for creating a page.

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.html-html.com/

Missed a colon off, should be ...


body {background:
url('http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/cam/British%20Museum/Pot%20pot..jpg')
50% 50% repeat; }
p {background: pink; color: blue; font-size: 1.2em; }
div {background: white; border: 1px blue solid ;}
h1 {font-size: x-large; }

"pbhj" wrote in message
...

Sorry, but I can't stop myself!

Using font tags is absolutely not the way to write a website!

font is something that almost anyone would recognize (If I were the say
head it would not have conveyed the information I was trying to pass). If
you are starting out with something you are completely new to, then you want
a stepping stone from one world to the next. The tutorials links listed and
others will point to what needs to be known far better than anyone could in
a brief email and you don't want to scare someone off from something that is
extremely easy by using jargon that for them is meaningless. What is useful
is a newsroom like alt.discuss.html where you can ask questions that are
related to what you are trying to accomplish.



font is deprecated - that means that browsers will likely not use it
to determine the font properties in a couple of years. What happens now
is that the content (your text and images) is separated from the style
(your colours, or "color" in web-world, and positioning). This is called
CSS it makes sites very easy to play around with and alter.

A simple site looks like this:

html
headtitle/title
style type="text/css" media="all"
/* this is what dictates how stuff looks it's the CSS, it often goes in
a separate file so that many pages can use the same style, that way
changing the CSS file changes the look of the whole site, clever! */

body {background
url('http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/cam/British%20Museum/Pot%20pot..jpg')
50% 50% repeat; }
p {background: pink; color: blue; font-size: 1.2em; }
div {background: white; border: 1px blue solid ;}
h1 {font-size: x-large; }

/style

/head
body

h1My amazing pot page/h1
div
pThis is some amazing pot,eh! img src="mypot.jpg" alt="a picture of
my pot" //p
pThat's all except this list:/p
ul
lifirst item/li
liand then maybe a a href="linkedPage.htm" title="a link
somewhere"/li
/ul
/div
/body

---end of web page source ---------

The bits in and are called tags, they say what structural elements
of the page you are inserting. The style bits refer to these, eg pis a
new paragraph/p. "p {color: red;}" in the style section tells it to
make all text in all paragraphs red.

HTH, it might give you something to work from anyway. If you don't want
to get into all of this finding a decent WYSIWYG editor (that works just
like a wordprocessor) is a good idea. Sorry I always hand code so I
can't really recommend anything, unless you use Linux??

Cheers

pbhj

http://alicious.com

jedi wrote:
You end the sentence with a
period. If you have text you want to be a certain size then you start
with
a font. When you are done with that font then you close with /font.

You can get html editors but it is really better if you learn to do the
coding yourself first with a simple text editor like notepad so that you
can
learn to debug errors when you get them. You can get space to build
your
page for as little as $5 a month. They will have a way to upload your
code
and probably help for creating a page.

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.html-html.com/

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, jedi wrote:

a brief email and you don't want to scare someone off from something that is
extremely easy by using jargon that for them is meaningless. What is useful

I contend that creating _good_ web pages is _not_ extremely easy. As
evidence, I submit thousands of web pages, designed by "professional" web
designers, that suck rocks.

It is easy to slap some text up on the web with some simple markup. But
simply knowing some simple markup doesn't give you the tools, visual
design sensibility, or understanding of good human/computer interfaces that
are required to develop _good_ web pages.

Start simple, yes. Start with already-outdated standards? No. If you
want to learn to exert control over presentation, learn Cascading Style
Sheets. And learn how to do it well... changing of font sizes is way
over-used. Too many designers don't understand that FONT SIZE="-3" may
look fine on their 20" monitor on Internet Explorer, but may be impossible
to read on a 17" monitor on Mozilla under Unix/X-Windows.

Anybody can dabble with web pages, and I encourage anybody to try their
hand at it. But designing good-looking, artistic web pages is
time-consuming, and it can take a couple years or more of "dabbling" to
gain a good understanding of how it all works together.

HTML itself is fairly simple, and if you stay away from the FONT tag (not
because it's deprecated, but because it's too easy to create pages that
look good on your browser and are difficult to read on other platforms and
browsers) and don't get crazy with trying to control the layout with
tables, frames or graphics, you can create pages that you know everyone
will be able to read comfortably. Once you're comfortable with that, then
start learning CSS.

(I guess I'm lucky in that I started writing web pages before CSS came
around, and learning HTML back then was really simple. Learning good
design wasn't, but the tool (HTML) wasn't difficult to learn. Trying to
learn HTML and CSS at the same time is a much bigger bite to chew, because
CSS isn't quite so straight-forward.)

--
Carl D Cravens )
Through argument comes illumination. Let's fight.

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 23:00:51 -0600, Carl D Cravens wrote:

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, jedi wrote:

a brief email and you don't want to scare someone off from something that is
extremely easy by using jargon that for them is meaningless. What is useful

I contend that creating _good_ web pages is _not_ extremely easy. As
evidence, I submit thousands of web pages, designed by "professional" web
designers, that suck rocks.

It is easy to slap some text up on the web with some simple markup. But
simply knowing some simple markup doesn't give you the tools, visual
design sensibility, or understanding of good human/computer interfaces that
are required to develop _good_ web pages.

Start simple, yes. Start with already-outdated standards? No. If you
want to learn to exert control over presentation, learn Cascading Style
Sheets. And learn how to do it well... changing of font sizes is way
over-used. Too many designers don't understand that FONT SIZE="-3" may
look fine on their 20" monitor on Internet Explorer, but may be impossible
to read on a 17" monitor on Mozilla under Unix/X-Windows.

Anybody can dabble with web pages, and I encourage anybody to try their
hand at it. But designing good-looking, artistic web pages is
time-consuming, and it can take a couple years or more of "dabbling" to
gain a good understanding of how it all works together.

HTML itself is fairly simple, and if you stay away from the FONT tag (not
because it's deprecated, but because it's too easy to create pages that
look good on your browser and are difficult to read on other platforms and
browsers) and don't get crazy with trying to control the layout with
tables, frames or graphics, you can create pages that you know everyone
will be able to read comfortably. Once you're comfortable with that, then
start learning CSS.

(I guess I'm lucky in that I started writing web pages before CSS came
around, and learning HTML back then was really simple. Learning good
design wasn't, but the tool (HTML) wasn't difficult to learn. Trying to
learn HTML and CSS at the same time is a much bigger bite to chew, because
CSS isn't quite so straight-forward.)

I am one of those who designed a my own half assed website with a two dollar
HTML book in my lap while pecking at a keyboard. I do not like the results.
Could you recommend how to " stay away from the FONT tag.."

On somewhat related topic I moved my website from one host to another. On my
previous host site I put a redirect like this:

META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="1; URL=http://www.viatrack.ca"

This works but now when user hits a back button it sends them to my previous
site which sends them to my new site thus trapping them in a loop. How to
avoid that? Sorry for hijacking the thread but I am a blatant opportunist.
In a lieu of apology a can send a free Gmail account to anybody who wants
one. See http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about.html



Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see:
Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things) http://www.viatrack.ca

"pbhj" wrote in message
...

Sorry, but I can't stop myself!

Using font tags is absolutely not the way to write a website!

font is deprecated - that means that browsers will likely not use it in
a couple years

Now exactly what makes up a CSS for a type-face? Would it be, in part, the
font tag?

People are safe using the font tags for many years to come.

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/asamuel-/

If you are simply going to be making a personal page with pictures and text,
it is simple and thousands of people do it. Remember I said KISS (keep it
simple stupid). The more complicated pages that use data bases, java code
and such is not what the original poster would be doing or care about.


"Carl D Cravens" wrote in message
ird.com...
On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, jedi wrote:

a brief email and you don't want to scare someone off from something
that is
extremely easy by using jargon that for them is meaningless. What is
useful

I contend that creating _good_ web pages is _not_ extremely easy. As
evidence, I submit thousands of web pages, designed by "professional" web
designers, that suck rocks.

It is easy to slap some text up on the web with some simple markup. But
simply knowing some simple markup doesn't give you the tools, visual
design sensibility, or understanding of good human/computer interfaces
that
are required to develop _good_ web pages.

Start simple, yes. Start with already-outdated standards? No. If you
want to learn to exert control over presentation, learn Cascading Style
Sheets. And learn how to do it well... changing of font sizes is way
over-used. Too many designers don't understand that FONT SIZE="-3" may
look fine on their 20" monitor on Internet Explorer, but may be impossible
to read on a 17" monitor on Mozilla under Unix/X-Windows.

Anybody can dabble with web pages, and I encourage anybody to try their
hand at it. But designing good-looking, artistic web pages is
time-consuming, and it can take a couple years or more of "dabbling" to
gain a good understanding of how it all works together.

HTML itself is fairly simple, and if you stay away from the FONT tag (not
because it's deprecated, but because it's too easy to create pages that
look good on your browser and are difficult to read on other platforms and
browsers) and don't get crazy with trying to control the layout with
tables, frames or graphics, you can create pages that you know everyone
will be able to read comfortably. Once you're comfortable with that, then
start learning CSS.

(I guess I'm lucky in that I started writing web pages before CSS came
around, and learning HTML back then was really simple. Learning good
design wasn't, but the tool (HTML) wasn't difficult to learn. Trying to
learn HTML and CSS at the same time is a much bigger bite to chew, because
CSS isn't quite so straight-forward.)

--
Carl D Cravens )
Through argument comes illumination. Let's fight.