Webmaster Apex
A Home for Webmasters

Especially for new webmasters, the size of your layout simply matches your computer’s resolution. However, this isn’t a good practice as is is possible that the majority of your site’s visitor’s use a different screen resolution.

When I first started, 800*600 (pixels) was the standard size for website layouts. However, the standard resolution nowadays is 1024*768, a vast improvement. Below is a chart of resolutions by percentage of users from MarketShare by NetApplications.

It is evident from this list that 1024*768 is now the most popular screen resolution and layouts should be made to its specs. The only population you may miss out on is the 800*600 population. This would cause about 6% of viewers to have to scroll to view the entirety of your website. If you really want to make a site easily viewable by everyone, you might still want to conform to the old standards of 800*600.

Note* Although not shown in the chart above, about 0.20% of screen resolutions is 320*396, the resolution for iPhones and the like. If you want to make pages for iPhone users, remember to create alternate pages that fit the 320*396 resolution.

Compatibility between browsers isn’t as big of an issue nowadays. But it still is important to check that your site appears the way you want it to in the major browsers, especially if your site receives a lot of traffic. Below is the table of the market shares of the major browsers from the reputable source, MarketShare.

As you can see from this table, nearly all internet users either use Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. So in order to ensure that your website is compatible with the majority of your users, simply download IE, Safari and Firefox and debug with each browser. For those seeking professionalism and have extra time on their hands, you could debug for all the browsers. I personally only check with IE and Firefox, which is more than 90% of the traffic anyways.

Even if you don’t debug for other browsers, as long as your website works in your browser, it should work in other people’s browsers too. Debugging shouldn’t be a major issue. Usually, differences in appearance between browsers are the cause of coding errors where each browser tries to process the errors differently or usage of code unique to the browser.

Visit 1&1

Happy Independence Day! Fitting with the holidays, I received a notice in a newsletter today that 1&1’s Home and Business Pro web hosting packages are free for one year.

Who doesn’t love free hosting?

However, as with most free deals, there is a marketing motive. The minimum term is two year and the setup fee is $9.99. Oh, and of course billing info. The plus side is that since you’re already following up on a two year minimum term, you can get a decent set of free software for a $3.49 shipping fee.

In addition, they also have a promotion for .com domain names. Keep in mind that most hosting plans have a free domain name included though. The offer is pretty good for people looking for extra domain names. In comparison, Bluehost’s service is $10 per domain.

Enjoy your fireworks and time with family tonight!

Note* This offer is only available until August.

Website design is often confusing for people attempting to create their first website. Often, premade layouts for blogging softwares or CMS (content management systems) are sufficient and don’t require much change.

However, many people eventually want to create their own layouts. Below are several basic components of web design.

Layout

Proper positioning of each aspect of your website is the first step. Often, there is a header, footer, content, and navigation space for the layout of the site. A basic layout is shown below.

Color Theory

Color theory is basically a theory that figures out which colors looks good together. Good web design ensures that the website is easy on the eyes, which requires knowledge of colors. Red usually attracts attention but is too bright for use on an entire site. Blue is the favorite color of more than half the population and is calming and soothing, etc, etc. You could write a whole book about color theory.

An awesome website for those who don’t know about color theory is WellStyled.com

Search Engine Friendly

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a huge buzzword nowadays. Essentially, you should create a site with easily indexable content, which means, flash and images that contain content should be swapped for interactive php, html and javascript pages. Meta tags are still important for some search engines although several major search engines like Google don’t use them anymore. Also, be sure the keywords your site wants to rank in are interspersed throughout the site, but don’t forcefully write tons of keywords as your ranking actually decreases because of that.

The most important thing is content. Content is king in the world of search. Although there are books and books on SEO, these are the basics that should be covered to make your site rank well in the search engines. The high quality links necessary for good placement will naturally come with good content.

Personal Touch

Your own personal touch is what makes your site special and makes it fit your site’s purpose! :] Have fun with it!

Coding Efficiency

Note: This used to be called Site Optimization, but due to the current popularity of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), people often confuse simple site optimization with SEO.

Site Optimization or Coding Efficiency is the practice of creating websites that load fast. This is definitely important so that your pages don’t take too long to load. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of super long loading websites that you’ve closed and decided not to visit.

Use abbreviations when possible while coding and try to keep the number of files to a minimum. This entails combining as many of your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files and PHP includes as possible. Keeping your image files at a low resolution helps too as well as avoiding large media files.

A good resource is WebSiteOptimization.com

Bluehost is the webhost of choice for many webmasters.
Visit Bluehost

I’ve personally used Bluehost for a few years and never had a problem with them. They are well established and have a reputation of being reliable and provide competitive offers. Because they only offer one product, they have the ability to focus on that product and outclass their competitors in the same niche. They are owned by the same company as Hostmonster.

Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth

They provide unlimited bandwidth and disk space within reason. At the time of posting, it is shown to be 614GB of space and bandwidth which is larger than my computer’s hard drive. I’m sure you could request for more if you use a media intensive website that offers large files for download or videos for streaming.

Bluehost’s Partners/Scripts

Bluehost has many partnerships with companies such as PR Web that provides credits for promoting your site which provides alot of nice opportunities to give your site a traffic boost. Bluehost also has many programs that install script or CMS(content management systems) for you as well as the the website statistic trackers like Awstats.

Other

Bluehost provides all the standard packaging most other hosts provide such as PHP and MYSQL support with unlimited domain names supportable and the first domain name registration free of charge. Unless you require very specific and nonstandard hosting, Bluehost is an excellent choice. For the full list of features, visit Bluehost via the link below.

Bluehost Official Website

Note* Although officially called Blue Host, many users refer to them as Bluehost.

Time to look for web hosting. You have two choices, Free or paid.

1. Free Hosting

Free hosting is everywhere but usually with a catch. Many of the better free hosting websites close down after a short while, while the well established free hosting providers have paltry features. Still, for a personal website for family and friends Geocities, Freewebs, or the like would be sufficient.

2. Paid Shared Hosting

Paid hosting comes in all shapes and sizes. However, for the average website builder, a shared hosting plan is sufficient. Many of these have similar packaging so usually the reputable time tested web hosts are used such as Blue Host and HostRocket. Personally my favorite is HostRocket at the moment. Features you should probably check for are PHP, MYSQL Databases, and enough Bandwidth and Disk Space. Unless you are hosting lots of media, be realistic about the actual amount of disk space you’ll need. 1GB is far more than you need.

Even if you are hosting a media website, Blue Host and Yahoo, and I’m sure many will follow in their steps, offer unlimited disk space (within reason).

Below are reviews and examples of good shared web hosting providers:

-Bluehost

-Hostmonster

-Yahoo!

3. Paid Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated Hosting differs from shared hosting in that you get your own private server. This way any issues or decisions will be totally up to you and other peoples websites won’t be on your server so it won’t affect you. Dedicated Hosting usually costs alot more though since they’re selling the server solely to you and not to several individuals.

Good Dedicated Hosts include:

-HostGator

4. Setting up your own server

This is pretty unpractical in most cases. The computer or server you use will have to run 24/7 and without a commercial internet connection, your site will be pretty slow in many cases and you’ll have to deal with installing all the programs and maintain security. If you already know how to set this up and are comfortable with it, chances are you are probably well versed in web design too. Perhaps in the future I’ll create a guide for this.

So now that you have dragged yourself to create that new website you’ve been wanting, what do you need to get started with your website?

1. Purpose/Idea

The most important thing you need to create a successful website is a central idea/purpose for you website regardless of whether it is a personal website, shopping site, group site, or site to showcase your mom’s cooking. Once you have a good purpose or idea for a website, you are eons ahead of many web designers.

Many people simply start building a site with a vague concept like “a basketball site” and start littering a web page with basketball images and scripts until it’s cluttered and looks like a myspace page. To create a good site, you have to define what the what the site will do and how it will do it. For example, if you have a basketball site, are you using it to idolize your favorite team? If so, how will you idolize them? One possibility is to give running commentary after each game you watch with another page of player profiles and one last page for wallpapers you’ve created. Although this is simply one possibility, it serves as an example of the depth you need to explore for the central purpose/theme of your website. Even though people eventually get around to knowing what there website is for, doing this early and essential planning will save you hours of designing, scrapping and redesigning your website.

2. Motivation/Work Ethic

This is a pretty obvious and well versed adage. You need to do everything NOW! I hesitate to say anything other than now because of the simple fact that once someone is faced with an overwhelming prospect, they usually give up and wander off to enjoy leisure time. If you have no problem with motivation and work ethic, that’s wonderful. If not, you can try setting small goals. There must be an overarching goal you have for making a website. So divide it into steps and make it a habit to work on your site a little bit everyday. Perhaps you buy the site the first day, upload a content management system (CMS) the second day, and create five articles the next day. This way, you can keep yourself focusing on small reachable chunks.

Even now, keeping my work ethic is the hardest part for me ;]

3. Knowledge

That’s what you’re here for!

4. Next Step

1. Web Hosting

2. Website Design