a web site in a weekend. yeah, right.
When I started Paul Hall Studios in 1997 I thought it would be a good idea to start a web site for it as well. One problem: my old 66 computer was not only obsolete but also it didn't have a modem. No way was I going to afford to upgrade. So I found a local service to do my website for me and put it on the internet and I wouldn't even need a computer. Oh, and by the way, they would handle the dot com name which I never got back (it was a different name).
The first thing I got on my first visit was a long lecture on do's and don't on the net. [Later, when I started doing the site myself, I broke all the rules which is probably why we only get eight hundred hits a day (July '01), and most of those are the spider monkeys from search engines.] So after giving me the lecture and also dictate to me how I must stick to one 'style' of painting, we hammer out a home page which looked great and I pay my two hundred bucks (which I understood to be a bargain -- the guy was getting a thousand or so from his serious customers, mostly for doing brochures and magazines). One rule I tried hard not to break was telling puns while in his little block house in the country farm setting where he and an associate did their thing. You know, jokes like the one about the internet surfer that ended up with webbed feet. Yuck! Yuck!
Someday when I can afford it, I'll have a different professional look at this site. But who can wait for that?
So I go down to the library and use the public computer to view the site. Great, but just a couple of pages. We need more content, and there's no shopping cart or ways for customers to get anything. Also I'm supposed to promote the site myself, one search engine at a time. Worst of all, I can't get anything else done because I got the bargain package and that means waiting for when they can see me, sometimes weeks.
They had a sort of search engine in the days of the knights of the round table but his name was actually Sir Chengine. He sat next to Sir Vival. Hey, I can do that, I'm not in the block house. They had internet surfers in the middle ages, too: In the days of feudalism, the fief would send the serfs to do the fishing but the guy who used a hook got the most attention because he would work without a net.
Then I was in a second hand book store and spotted a book called "Create Your First Web Page in a Weekend" by Steven Callihan. I bought it thinking I would read it and see what I could do about making my own web site just like those two girls did on the TV add aired in 1994 to market their rubber sun glasses. And in TV advertising fantasy, after they got online everybody under the sun was wearing their shades. With my bizarre kind of dyslexia, I can often end up reading the same page for sometimes hours till I realize my plight, so I'm getting lots of books I am always determined to read later.
I'm glad they've got green catsup now because red means stop and green means go and I've now got to catsup on a lot of reading! They tried that green catsup in the zoo and now it's red between the lions. One of the lions tried to do a self portrait and ended up with a mere roar. click for more jokes
After Jen and I got married and with our combined incomes could at last afford a real not-obsolete computer with a modem, one day when I was talking to her about the useless web page sitting there collecting cyber dust on the internet, I remembered Steve Callihan's book. Well, it took more than a weekend, probably because at the time Jen was working as a night receiver and I was cleaning floors for the same unnamable (at least here) super store on the third shift and we didn't get weekends. By then it was '99 and we had to both work to service the debt incurred starting the business, caring for my aging mother, and trying to pay for the second hand car's upkeep (around here, in this part of first world America with no public transportation, no car, no job).
Now, they say those big stores put the mom&pop stores out of business, but the biggies are mom&pop, because both mom and pop and all their kids of working age have to work full time plus part time just to make ends meet these days. But Jen read my heretofore dyslexially unreadable book and had our first real web site up and running on our new computer not long afterwards after all the accompanying formalities such as getting the domain name and so on.
Later we ended up (for a while) working for another super store (aren't they all by now?) but this time an office supply superstore. Jen stocked shelves and I cleaned floors. I was overqualified for this one, too, but fortunately for me the management had tried to do floors thinking that the wax would clean the floors in one step. The wax was water soluble so it came up slowly after several months and they thought me a cleaning genius. This store had a pretty good software aisle (which had the dirtiest floor in the whole place) and that's where I found Microsoft Front Page. If Microsoft had called it something else, I would have gotten it a lot earlier, but when I saw it in the catalogues, I kept thinking who needs just the front page and wondered why the first page would be so important that software for it would cost so much. It's really not just the front page, it's the whole web site and more. It handles whole bunches of sites.
It's known as a "wysiwyg" pronounced "whissiewigg". What I calls the "little wiggies" as in "this little wiggie went to market". When you use it the html code it writes is sort of sloppy and lengthy. So if you can learn code you'll get pages that load slightly faster. But I'll tell you, partner, them wiggs sho do beat walkin! Don't it?
Of course, there are other wiggies like
Dream Weaver if you can afford it, and last I looked, IBM does one, Adobie does
one, and so do lotsa others, but I know 'soft's Front Page works on a concept of
synthetic intelligence known as intuitive, meaning just start somewhere and if
you don't know what you're doing it flashes the "do you really want
to..." sign at you and you can click cancel for
"whoops".
At last I realized what this was (and how much it was!), so we bought it and brought it home. Jen loaded it with some difficulty (remember this was back in two thousand) and then taught me how to get started with it. Then I went to town with the thing! It was rigged so you could just start somewhere and expand out from there. I learned to publish before I could hyperlink.
Now you've got to get someone to keep your site for you and zap the content to any who hit or request to browse pages of your little webbie. So you can look up web hosting on your choice of search engines, but why not try Valueweb? They don't cost much and have good support and statistic checkers, and you need stats to decide where you're going to follow up. They'll help you get your web name called a "domain name". The don't forget that your home page should be called "index" on "root directory" which is the main file area where your basic folders are found. Don't put your pages on the root directory, put them in folders.
Next you'll need to promote your site. For this I recommend Addweb. Right now they have the Addweb 6 website promoter, which I finally recently (April of '04) have been able to afford. I'm still using 4 point something. There may be better promoters, but I tried a few and didn't have time to look around further. It's a good place to start and you can download the software for about fifty bucks which isn't all that much if you've got it. Plus they have a complete course in website promoting in their documentation. If you register you can re-download every time you have to reformat your hard drive and reload everything. Just remember there are maybe millions of sites out there so you might not get noticed that way, but at least someone will find you if they're looking.
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Paul A. L. Hall
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2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
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