Design Your Own Web

Open source is software that has been contributed to the online community. Open source usually means that the source code is available and can be used, changed and edited.

So what does this all mean to you?

The open source community has some great programs available for you to use for FREE.

For example, Nvu and the GIMP are both FREE open source programs. And so anyone who wants to create a website or design some graphics can use these programs for FREE. There is no charge. That’s one of the beauties of open source. And that’s why we support open source with our free tutorials. To help contribue to the community.

Besides, Nvu and the GIMP, there are some other great open source programs. One of the most recent I’ve stumbled across was OpenOffice.org by Sun Microsystems. Open Office is a complete office suite that allows you to create speadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, databases, etc.

And after using it for a few days, I have to say it is awesome. I mean I didn’t own the other popular brand names, mostly because they are expensive, but Open Office is truly compatible with the major office suites brands and it’s free. You can’t beat that.

Need a spreadsheet? Or to create a pdf? Try Open Office. Easy to download, install and use, I am thoroughly impressed with Sun’s contribution to the community. Thank you very much to all those who made that project possible.

So, probably in the not so distant, there might just be some Open Office tutorials coming soon!! Also I want to thank my friend Glenn and his biofeedback site for telling me about Open Office.

Just last night, I was talking to a friend who wanted a web site, but didn’t know what web hosting was and thought it was too complicated to do her self. And she isn’t the only one.

Actually creating your own web site is ridiculously easy to do. And we help by giving you free video tutorials and free software to make your web pages. If you have ever used a word processor or sat at a typewriter, then you can create your own website. I promise.

Ok, so just what is web hosting? Web hosting is simply a place where you can store your web pages. It’s like one of those big storage unit rental places, where you can store all your stuff when you’re moving. You rent a space, which you can lock, and you can store, add, remove or swap out your stuff anytime you want. If you have a BIG website then you’ll need lots of space, if not go with the smallest possible. That’s really all a web host is, a storage facility.

When you sign up for a web host, you pay a small monthly or yearly fee, and they give you a place to store your web pages so that the world can come visit. They’ll ask you to create a username and password and then you enter that information into your web page editor and you can store (also called uploading, or sending) your web pages to that space.

It’s also a good idea when you’re getting web hosting space, to buy a domain name at the same time with the same company. And typically you’d do that first. The domain name tells you and other people where to find your website. It’s your unique address.

For web hosting and domain names, we personally use and recommend…

Optimal Web Hosting

But we suggest and recommend others as well. Check out our web hosting page at www.designyourownweb.com for more detailed information.

Creating your website is not complicated. There are some steps you have to follow, yes, but it’s actually very easy. Anyone can do it.

A podcast is just an audio recording stored on someone’s website that you can listen to online. You can also download it to your computer or iPod (or mp3 player) and listen to the podcast later. It’s called a podcast, because people can listen to the recorded audio on their iPods. But you don’t need an iPod to listen to a podcast. If you have speakers on your computer, you can listen to a podcast.

And anyone can create their own podcast, all you really need is a microphone and some software. In fact, some of the software out there is FREE. So you just need to buy a good microphone and your in business.

There are tons of podcasts now available. And of course, pod casting directories have compiled huge lists of this recent trend. All of these podcasts relay information via a talk format. As I write this post, I am listening to an interview as well.

That ability to multitask to me is one of the major advantages of podcasts versus just reading websites. For me, I can listen to a podcast and work on the computer at the same time. It’s a way I use to multitask. I have yet to develop the skill to read multiple websites at the same time. The other major advantage of podcasts is that you get to hear the creator of the podcast. You can tell alot about listening to someone’s voice. Communication is 45% tone and words. The best option is video, where you get to see the other 55%. By the way there are video casts, those are called vlogs.

So podcasts are usually just mp3 recordings. mp3 is a way to compress the audio into a smaller file size without losing tons of quality. You’ll need special software to compress your recording into a mp3 file format. One free program out there is the open source program audacity. You can use audacity to record and save your recording in an mp3 format.

Once you have a saved recording in mp3 format you can upload that to your site. Now many people also include that mp3 recording in an RSS feed. We talked about RSS a couple posts ago. That way, people can subscribe to your podcast. Whenever you release a new podcast, you can have subscription based audience to podcast to.

For example, after creating your podcast and the relevant RSS information, you can submit this information to various podcasting directories. So you can literally, today, start your own talk show and your own podcast.

Now, you just need something interesting to talk about…

Recently I ran across an ad for Yahoo! Widgets. I’d actually never heard of them and was apparently in the dark. Not too hard to do considering the billions of web pages out there. So I clicked on the ad. I love a great mystery!

Anyway, I bravely downloaded and installed Yahoo! Widgets on my desktop. And I gotta say I like them. Widgets are little applications you can run on your desktop. For example, right now I have the weather (a very cool, 5 day weather forecasting tool with moon information), a small desktop picture frame with my pictures (with a new picture every 5 minutes), and a seasonal college basketball schedule / score reporter (letting me know what games are on and when.). So it’s pretty cool stuff.

There’s no charge for widgets and there are 1,000 to choose from. Others I have running are pictures of the beach to see what the surf is like (I live in Virginia Beach) and some monitors for internet access, computer resources, etc. I ahd the Homer Simpson widget, but after a few minutes of Homer’s audible antics, he got removed. Just don’t like being insulted every couple minutes by a cartoon character.

So, if you get a chance, I’d recommend checking it out… just search for Yahoo! Widgets…

Web Hosting is getting cheaper these days. Long gone are the days you’d have to pay $20 per month for a decent web host. In fact, for most websites, all you need is a basic web hosting account. And if you’re paying more than $10 per month, I’d say you’re getting robbed.

And believe me, I have re-created numerous sites for clients who were paying upwards to $100 per month for their business website by some major companies out to simply take advantage of people. One company I was hired to redo their website was paying $1200 per year for a 5 page website, got no traffic and couldn’t be found in the search engines. They received no phone calls, no emails in over a year.

So they hired me. I immediately switched them over to Optimal Web Hosting to a basic account ($3.95) and re-did their site. They can now be found in the search engines and are actually getting traffic now. $1200 per year for a 5 page site should be criminal.

Optimal Web Hosting, for example, starts their basic web hosting at only $3.95 per month. This includes some great perks, like 250 Gig of bandwidth. That’s alot of bandwidth. It would be pretty hard to use that much in a month, but I am going to try with this site.

So some things to consider when choosing a web host…

Bandwidth - How much data transfer each month, the more the better
Php / mysql - Offers MySQL Databases and PHP, a programming language where you can eaily install tons of scripts (like forums, online chat, etc).
Email accounts - Does it include email accounts like yourname@yourwebsite.com?
Disk space - How much storage you have, do you have enough to store pictures and videos, etc?
Advertising banners - Does you web host put ads on your site? Most, if not all, FREE ones put ads on your site.
Techincal Support - Does your web host offer 24 hour telephone tech support?
Uptime Guarantee - Is your site actually going to be up and running when you visit it?

There are numerous things to consider when picking a web hosting company. We use Optimal Web Hosting for a number of our sites, including this one and it works great for us. It offers 24 hour tech support, 99.9% uptime guarantee, huge data storage and bandwidth capabilites, unique IP addresses for each site, no advertising banners, tons of email accounts and overall we’ve been quite happy with it and keep returning for more sites.

Now, if you’re technically inclined then you can use your computer to host your own web site, but you’d have to leave your computer on 24 hours and you’d have to have a heck of hi speed connection to pull it off. I have a number of friends who host at home and most of their sites are slow and you can tell. But if you don’t have lots of graphics and video then you could get away with it.

Anyway, things to consider when choosing a web hosting company…

We’ve added 4 more video tutorials. These tutorials combine the GIMP (free graphics image editing software) and Nvu (free web page designer) to put some finishing touches on the earlier videos we offered.

These tutorials show step by step how to design a header image using the GIMP, how to insert that header image into Nvu and how to update the navigation from text to graphic images.

An example of the finished home page for the website is at My Poker Insights

Coming up next, we’ll finish the HTML tutorials and begin offering the CSS tutorials.

Stay tuned.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way of syndicating (sharing of content among different web sites) information of all sorts. This information can be news feeds (like CNN or CBS News) or can be from a personal blog (like this one). The language used to create RSS Feeds is called XML.

So what? Well, here’s how RSS can help you….

Understanding a little about RSS and XML allows you to subscribe to different news feeds. It allows you to literally design your own daily news choices.

For example, let’s say you just want to get the men’s basketball news. You can go and sign up for a news feed just for Yahoo’s Men’s College Basketball feed. And then you’ll be kept up to date on the college basketball scene automatically.

Now clicking that link won’t do you any good UNLESS you have a news reader.

A news reader is needed to decipher the XML language that the RSS news feed was generated. News Readers are designed to every once in a while (you determine the frequency) check ALL of your news feeds that you signed up for (you can sign up for tons if you wanted).

Once it checks them all, any updated news feeds are then displayed as headlines in the your news reader. You can then choose to read either the entire article or pass based on the headline or your interest or time.

Using news readers is a great way to keep updated and keep in touch with the websites you really enjoyed. Good RSS feeds will continually show you new and interesting things.

Here’s the step by step…

1) Get a news reader. There are many readers, most are FREE. You can get a desktop news reader (like Feed Reader) or you can go with an online reader (like MyYahoo, or Google Reader or Bloglines).

2) Go to a website that has a news feed or an RSS feed. Often times they’ll display some symbols like…

or or the new

3) Clicking on that symbol will only get you gibberish (or XML language). What you’ll need to do is to copy that feed code (http:// code in your address bar if you clicked on it OR just right click on the orange button and copy the link code) and then put it in your news reader. Typically there will be an option to ‘Add a new feed’ in your reader. Just paste that feed code into your news reader. You’ll then begin getting all the news feeds from that site.

4) You can add as many news feeds as you have time for. You can always delete them if you don’t have time or if they aren’t very good feeds.

5) News feeds are helpful in that they don’t get blocked by SPAM filters and you don’t have to give away any personal information (like email address) to sign up for a news feed. It puts you in charge of what you’d like to receive.

It’s been suggested that only about 15% of the population actually have news readers. But, with the release of the new Windows coming out soon, it will supposedly have a built in news reader and the popularity of news feeds will probably increase dramatically.

If you haven’t already, try out a news reader and sign up for some news feeds.

Our news feed is at the bottom of this page (the little RSS link in the blue bar). Design Your Own Web Newsfeed.

Until the next ‘What the heck??‘….see you then!

A blog is really slang for web log. But now it’s closer to a household term than slang. Amazingly, even our 9 year old knew what a blog was. She said it was a diary. Not bad for 9. And she’s right, but there’s really more to it (as always). For those of us not quite up to date, here’s some more insight on just what the heck a blog is.

A blog can actually be many things. It can be a personal journal, it can be a business tool, it can be a diary, it can be a reminder for you about cool website you’ve found, it can be a content management system, and it can really be a wide variety of things. If you have spent any time at all reading blogs, then you know what I am talking about.

The great thing about blogs is that anyone can create their own blog. Using free software you can have your own blog up and running in just minutes. Then you just write about what ever is on your mind. You can create a blog for your friends and family to share information, like pictures for example.

The best way to learn what a blog is by setting up your own. Here’s some tools to do just that:

Blogger - Google’s FREE blogging account tools.
Yahoo 360 - Yahoo’s FREE blogging.
MSN Spaces - MSN’s blogging account tools.

All the above are FREE and are hosted on their servers. If you want to host it on your own server, then try a blog program like WordPress or Moveable Type.

Some notable blogs of interest…

Design Your Own Webs’ Blog - This blog right here.
Ask Dave Taylor
Brad Fallon’s Blog
Massage Therapy Online

That should be enough to get you started. What you do with your own blog is up to you. It’s basically just a blank canvas waiting to be created…

Also just released are our GIMP video tutorials. We have 10 video lessons that go over the basics of how to use the GIMP. We’ve covered the tools, the dialogs, the file types for the web and much more.

The Gimp video tutorials are ALL free and are designed for people who have never used the GIMP before. Interestingly enough, though, once you learn the GIMP, other graphics software packages will be oddly familiar and probably just as easy to use.

Over the weeks, months and years to come we will be adding more and more tutorials for the GIMP…

Enjoy!

Our brand new Nvu video tutorials are now up and running. They are designed for the beginner in mind and teach the classic table layout. There are 9 video lessons right now that go through step by step how to design a website using the free web site editor Nvu.

We also offer step by step text instructions for those who don’t have a high speed connection. Because the videos are very large, you’ll definitely need high speed to watch them.

All the basic tutorials are free of charge. And there is even a bonus video lesson on how to add Adsense to your webpages you created with Nvu (since there’s some special instructions that are needed.)

Let me know what you think…

Coming soon will be the intro to CSS.