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Alvin Finch MIMIS MBCS MIET  51 Lakeside, Bracknell  Phone 07008 900 055  (01344 64 22 44)  Click here to send me an e-mail

How do I get my family a web site?

This presumes that you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as BT, Lycos, or AOL. An ISP allows you to connect to the Internet to create and update a website.

Some companies provide packages that lead you through all of the steps, or you may like to take a more do-it-yourself route.

First you need to have a “domain name”. This is the “address” of your information and could look like smithfamily.info . The trouble with domain name though is that often someone else has been there before you, and you will have to think up a name relevant to yourself like smithkinberks.info . Domain names can be of any length up to 67 characters.
Registrations fees vary depending on the Top Level Domain Name (TLD). That is the set of letters after the final “dot” (in this case info). Fees Start at £7.50 (or less in promotions) up to £30.00. Domain names can be bought from a huge number of providers, such as Lycos (fairly user friendly) and UK2.net (more DIY).

Secondly you will need “web space” if you are signed up to a “pay monthly” ISP you will probably have free web space included. The provider that you bought the domain name from will probably have a tool that allows you to “point” your domain name at the free web space, but this can have limitations though. If you have bought an “all in one” type package the web space will be included.
Web space costs start at about £30.00 a year for 50 Mega bytes of space and £60.00 for 1 Giabyte. Another factor to bear in mind is the amount of information that the provider will allow to be transferred.

We are now ready to start building our website. The providers of web space usually give you “easy to use” web pages to transfer information from your computer to your web space. In all cases the provider will have given you details of an FTP address.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. A very basic program for doing this is built into Windows, and may be accessed from the command prompt. Much more sophisticated versions can be bought in shops, online or obtained from magazine cover discs.

All of a Web Site is normally linked to a “home page”. This is usually called “index.html”. Most of the pages you create will usually have the suffix “.htm” or “.html” which stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language. This may be created automatically if you have bought an all-in-one package, or with one of the many tools available. Microsoft Word has an option to save documents as web pages.

Other (perhaps frighteningly technical) things to consider for your website that would take a lot more space to explain are email clients, database access programs (SQL etc.), scripting and dynamic pages (CGI, PHP, ASP etc) and Flash animations.