Webmastering

I created RockCairn.com with a number of things in mind.

Who is my audience.

Speed (what is the download speed of the average internet user?)

Finding information which is of interest, and fast.

Moving through the pages with ease.

Making the initial page load fast and give immediate direction of where to go next.

Providing an obvious way to submit questions and suggestions to the Webmaster.

Providing interesting and eye catching graphics without distracting from the site.

Providing a good color scheme for the viewer to easily read the pages with.

Make sure that people can find the web site through the most commonly used search engines.

A way to keep track of the number of "hits" the site gets.

The Tools.

TextMate (on Mac OSX)

Linux, Apache Server, MySql, and PHP (LAMP).

Adobe PhotoShop or GIMP.

Scanner.

Digital Camera and Digital Video recorder.

Some CGI and Javascript knowledge.

Web hosting; current ISP or try www.godaddy.com

Filezilla to upload/download files on the web site hosting server.

Interest in learning new technologies.

Not afraid the make mistakes.

The Tricks.

Testing your pages from various browsers (Firefox, Safari, and IE).

Using the right tool for the job, is it really a table or should CSS positioning be used.

Adding pictures to the site which are of low page weight (kbs) but link to higher quality images.

The Domain

Register a domain name at a place like www.godaddy.com

Have them host or forward/mask your domain.

The Resources.

HTML -w3schools.com

Style Guides (CSS) -w3schools.com

Colors -X11 colors, meyerweb.com, easyrgb.com

Javascript -lies.com, perl.com, web-source.net

Graphics -Fotosearch.com (Stock Photos) -Stay away from animated gifs.