creating a camera web site

[Andrew]

i am wondering if some people wouldnt mind sharing some expertise or advice on how they created their web sites, and relevent costs involved, initially and ongoing costs...perhaps how they went about it and the dificulty in doing so.

this just reminded me because in the latest OM-1 thread Reijo (Reiska) mentioned his site so i had a quick look. it seems a nice site, the site name comes up in the address bar, as that site name-meaning it doesnt have 'www google myname camera site' or something simular. i remember some other members here have some nice sites as well but off the top of my head i forget just at the moment who..Peter i think, and a minolta one i can remember

i often think about having a web site, but mucked around a little with google free sites and i didnt like them much at all, not to mention the addresses arnt simple and straight forward--i guess i would like it to look neat and professional. it would be nice if i could find some way for it to pay for itself but that is likely hoping for far too much. at this stage i guess it would be kinda like a vitual bookcase of my camera collection, although perhaps just my welta at the moement. somewhere which would be almost more for myself in keeping all my information in an organised way i guess. although it may serve interesting for others as i have never found much on the web for welta in the past...

perhaps down the track a photo gallery may be nice--to sell some prints, even better to help pay for the site?! but that is likely hoping for too much and a bit fanicfull. its just i notice some people have such galleries with pics for sale and i often wonder if they sell any

[PeterW]

Hi Andrew,

I don't know if it will be any help but when I first became interested in creating a website I tried various website generating programs like Front Page, Ready Set Go, and a couple of shareware ones which were hopeless.

After playing about for some months I settled on Dreamweaver, which I believe is used by many pros. It's quite expensive, but I don't buy the latest versions of expensive software. When a new version appears I read about it in the PC magazines and, if the new features don't really apply to what I want to do I hunt round various stores which sometimes sell off their stock of the old version at less than half price, or I look at the secondhand market for someone who has bought the latest version (some guys just have to have the latest everything) and, provided they've got the documentation so I can re-register it in my name, I'll make an offer. All my 'expensive' software is older versions, some three or four versions old, but they do what I want them to do.

With regard to hosting, I rent space with a small independent host company. I get enough to put up two websites, my personal one and my business one, with lots of room for expansion. It costs, if I remember rightly, about £40 a year. The guy who hosts it also looks after registering my domain names and reminds me when renewal is due.

I've sat in with a friend who uses one of the host companies that give you a 'free' website layout program provided they can host your site - at a charge. Their advertising is very persuasive, and I found the software easy to learn but very basic, and the hosting wasn't cheap.

Dreamweaver isn't easy to learn at first, it isn't intuitive, but with the help of a couple of books I got the hang of it fairly soon, though I'm still learning all its features, mainly by trial and error and with help from other users on the internet. There are a couple of free tutorials on the net, as there is with Photoshop. Dreamweaver lets you see how your site will look on several of the popular browsers before you go live.

You'll also need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to put your website on the host server, but I use a free one called, believe or not, Free FTP Manager which I find effective and easy to use. I've got a lot of updating to do on my camera website when I get the time, but though I'm supposed to be retired I seem to find more to do than ever.

Hope you get replies from other members with websites so you can compare experiences and have a few dry runs at designing your own website before you go 'live'.

Generally, when I'm browsing, I find the websites which are laid out fairly simply and clearly are easier to read than some others that are all bells and whistles and gizmos but leave you doing a lot of hunting around them to find what you want.
PeterW

[Reiska]

Hi,

Peter wrote it all, so there is not much to add.

At first you have to get a host (server) and a domain name. Those web hotels, hosts or what they are called are eager to help you. The "thecamerasite.net" is a subdomain under the www.lauro.fi which is a main domain and an address of my personal homepage, but it is hidden from the address bar.

The content of my website is actually in two different locations, mainly in the servers of my host, Neobitti Oy, the other space is at my DSL provider as a "free gift".

I make my pages with Dreamweaver just like Peter. It is a professional and extremely versatile but actually rather easy to learn. It is so called wysiwyg program. What You See Is What You Get. Suitable FTP programs are free. I have used FileZilla FTP-client .

Easiest way is to start using a template and them modifying it as needed.

[casualcollector]

It's been about 6 years since I began The Casual Collector. It's been over four years since I last added to it.

After listening to a web design teacher sing the praises of Dreamweaver, I used Front Page since I already had it! The host is my former, local telephone company. Like Reiska I was provided ten megabytes of space as part of my DSL subscription.

Since I am no longer with that phone/internet provider I can not add to or change the site. With an upcoming work cutback and extended holiday shut down, I may go looking for a new host and get the site its own domain.

Bill

[drako]

To quote a favorite episode of Star Trek, "Books, young man! Books!"

Find a simple, basic book on HTML language. It is very easy to learn; don't believe anyone who tells you you will not need to know this. I agree that the "websites made simple" software usually thrown in for free with a web hosting package are garbage.

I started my e-commerce site, www.GoldMountainMining.com in 2001 after reading basic books on HTML and Dreamweaver. The site consumes my life to this day but I am still using the same version of Dreamweaver I used then, 4.0.

GoDaddy.com offers reasonable rates for web hosting. You can purchase your domain there as well as wire it in to your own server space there. I prefer the big name companies for hosting as they have robust back-up. My e-commerce site is hosted by Yahoo and has never been down.

But now we are rebuilding our entire system from scratch, so I'm afraid I have another learning curve ahead. The thing about webmastering is that you never, never run out of things to learn. For better and for worse!

One suggestion along your learning path is to hunt out simple pages on the web and then copy the underlying code into Dreamweaver (or Front Page or whatever). In Internet Explorer you can grab a web page's code with View > Source. Take your time and look closely at how things were constructed.

[PeterW]

Hi Andrew,

I agree with Johnny Drako that a working knowledge of HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is not all that difficult to learn. Nothing like as difficult to learn as, for example, JavaScript or C++. But writing a web page straight into HTML can still be daunting.

The biggest headache in my fairly limited experience is chasing an error - and we all make them.

An error like leaving out a %, ", <, >, or similar character, or getting it out of place, or hitting the wrong key, can sometimes take hours to find.

As you sometimes have difficulties in reading the order of characters and symbols don't be put off if you don't get the hang of HTML straightaway.

I would suggest that you start with a web page generating program like Dreamweaver, which everyone seems to agree is the one to use. In Dreamweaver you can go to 'View' and look at either Design, which is the basic layout, or the coding for it, or Design and Code together on a split screen.

Being able to do something in the design view and see how Dreamweaver has translated this into HTML code is a very useful way of seeing in practice the things you learn from a book on HTML.

By all means have a go at learning HTML because it can come in very useful. Good though Dreamweaver is, it isn't 100% WYSIWYG, at least my older version isn't.

For example, sometimes, when you're placing a picture inside a block of text, it doesn't go quite where you want it to, or the way the text runs around it isn't quite what you want when you view the page in a browser like Interrnet Explorer.

You can often get it how you want by trial and error with Dreamweaver which is what I usually do, but it can often make things faster and often easier if you have a look at the coding for that part of the page and compare it with the coding on someone else's web page where they have got the sort of thing you want.

That way you can learn how to tweak your coding to do the same thing, and see how it affects the page in the Dreamweaver design view. It's also useful in understanding, for example, how to place a single cell of text for the picture caption inside the picture box and, if necessary, get the main body of the text to run round that as well.

IMHO it's possible to generate a good looking web page without knowing anything about HTML code, but the deeper you get into web page design, trying to put your ideas into practice, the more you realise how useful even a fairly basic knowledge of HTML can be.

In a way, it's similar to switching off auto focus and auto exposure on a camera and using the focus point, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field and so on to get what you want with manual control.

I hope you go ahead with your own web pages. Best of luck with them.

PeterW

[Deleted]

I'm still using the very first version of Dreamweaver which works very well for me. It is an expensive program to buy new, however. You don't have to be an HTML expert to do your own site but some basic knowledge helps.

I go through a provider here in the States called bluehost.com $7 a month gets me my own domain name plus as many email addresses as I want to set up. It also has free antispam and antivirus, too and several gigs of server space for my website. But the BEST thing about it is if you call for support you talk to a nice young man or woman in Utah--not India. There's a lot more features than I will ever use. Hosting is a competitive business so the user cost has really come down.

[Andrew]

Thanks for all the responses; it really is a bit confusing when you don’t know where to start.

I did browse through some ready made templates that are available to buy and downloaded a few sample templates but I couldn’t get them to open or work so I gave up on that idea. Dreamweaver sounds like something I could get to work without too much bother, if I cant find an older copy for cheaper then possibly it may be available for sale with academic discount, if it is, that is usually quite a good discount.

I was looking at a new computer not long ago (as mine is getting worn and long in the tooth) and it was suggested to me to change over to using Mac/Apple instead. So I went to the store and got a bit of a demonstration, one of the things it comes packaged with is web template that looked dead easy and they seemed to have good designs with good layouts/navigations. Is there any disadvantage anyone can say about using them?

That’s ‘if’ I can get a new computer that is (only so much money), as one of my sons is starting University and he wants/needs a computer and refuses to have my old one and also refuses to have an Apple-has his mind set on building his own PC with his ‘expert’ friend. He has been looking forward to trying to build his own for a long time and he says I promised eons ago so fingers crossed it doesn’t end up costing me a fortune(which I probably did so I will let him have what he wants, he has worked hard and I think it will ok for him anyway) .

So I guess that covers the actual making of the web pages, either dreamwaever or the ready templates on the Apple, if the later is OK and I actually end up with one, which is looking increasingly unlikely drawing close to xmas.

[Andrew]

However I am still confused on the actual provider side of things. I don’t quite understand how you can have two different web sites under the one (for lack of a better word or understanding) account/web site set up? I may be able to make use of two different sites, one for business and one for camera stuff but I don’t really want the expense of two seperate sites if it can be avoided

Also I assume it makes sense to purchase these things from someone in our own country?

A place called Telstra is the main tele-communication company here and of course they provide internet things-my broadband & phone accounts are with them already. I am led to believe that they purchase off Web Central but I can’t see any difference in price which I was led to believe there is meant to be, but then I don’t understand all the disk space and transfer bits that much. Many people don’t like the huge Telstra Company, a bit of a monopoly and people say they charge too much.

If I include a couple of pages that I found, perhaps you can have a look and say if they are reasonably priced and what features I may need. For instance the difference between the bronze, silver, gold or the business plans. Bronze is $10 a month (AU dollars), Silver $15 and business economy is $39. The weird thing is it looks to me that the business plans allow less Disk space and transfer rates than equivalent other plans even though they are more expensive. Also there are columns which say things about whether they have PHP and such…it starts to go over my head after a while and I can just see that I will end up being stuck with the wrong thing. I really don’t want to rely on just asking Telstra, as they are likely to sell me/ sign me up for something that I may not need. I would like at least a basic understanding of what I should need first. Also I am worried that if traffic goes over expected amounts I could end up with a huge bill (15 cents per MB). I imagine someone wanting to cause trouble could go to your site just to increase traffic and I would end up with an unexpected high bill to pay

Bronze $10 month. Which seems to about the cost most here are saying that they spend (given exchange rates).
my.bigpond.com/hostingandstorage/webhostingbronze/default.do

Silver $15
my.bigpond.com/hostingandstorage/webhostingsilver/default.do

Gold $20
my.bigpond.com/hostingandstorage/webhostinggold/default.do

Buisness economy Bigpond $40 month..only 200mb disk space!?
my.bigpond.com/hostingandstorage/premiumhosting/200/default.do

Web Central –seems the same as bigpond premium/business plans
www.webcentral.com.au/websitehosting.php


Also it seems important not to get stuck with, as I think Wayne (edit; that should be Bill) mentioned, that if I make a domain name and later change web site provider, can this name move with me to the new provider.

It all seems a rather expensive thing just so everyone else can read and see our information for free LOL. If it was in a book everyone else would have to pay haha

[Deleted]

Apple users will argue the point but I have worked with both and there is a great deal more software available for PCs than for Macs. In additional, Apple software more than a couple of years old often won't run on newer machines while even old PC software usually runs on even the newest PC. I initially ran my version of Dreamweaver on Windows 98. Now I'm running it on Windows Vista.

[mickeyobe]

Wayne,

My new iMac is waiting for me to install Windows XP via Bootcamp as soon as I can overcome my fear of messing everything up.
There are a number of terrifying caveats. I shall probably wait for one of my I.T. grandsons to do it for me.

iMac will then be able to handle Windows/PC software "natively" which I presume means at the same speed and utilizing all of a programme's features as a PC.

I shall then be able to use some old Windows programmes that I have from my old and happily long gone IBM days.

I am particularly looking forward to being able to use E-Z Personal Collector 2002 to track and organize my collection.
It was, circa IBM, for me, the best and easiest and most suitable of any such programme that I have encountered.
The manufacturer/publisher/creator is out of business.

Mickey

[Reiska]

Knowing and understanding HTML is absolutely advisable but it is not necessary. If you are an expert in HTML you can perhaps tab cleaner code but with HTML editor it is easier and as mentioned if you like, you can write code too.
Andrew, why not download a trial version of Dreamweaver and see how it goes. You can immediately start creating pages and save them to your hard drive.
An addon domain allows you to reach a sub-domain when entering the name of the addon domain into a browser. This means that you can host additional domains from one account, if allowed by your hosting provider.

thecamerasite.net/web/cPanel.jpg

That link opens a screen-capture of the "dashboard" of cPanel, which is provided with my "space". The size of my camera site is now about 100Mb and the rest of total 414.99Mb/1000Mb is filled with my personal homepage.