Getting Your Page
Online
Once you create a stellar Web page, you
will want to put it on a Web server for all the world to
see. Many services and institutions with Web servers
offer free space to post your pages. AOL offers free
space to their members, and many colleges offer space to
their students. There are also many commercial sites
that offer free space. The only drawback to these
options is that you will most likely have to display the
site's advertisement banner on top of or within your
page. Here are a few of these free commercial sources:
You also have the option of paying a hosting service
for Web space. Most professional sites go this route.
Hosting services can provide their clients with large
amounts of space, special options and reliability. Using
a hosting service also gives you the ability to use a
domain name, your own
unique
URL.
If you are interested in obtaining your own domain name, visit the
Accredited Registrars page at ICANN.org, the agency that maintains IP
addresses and domain registry. At any of the listed Web sites, you can
check on the availability of domain names you are considering and purchase
one that appeals to you. The cost for an annual contract is usually less
if you have a hosting service in place, so when you become serious about
purchasing a domain name, contact a hosting service first. Most hosting
services will also register your domain name for you, providing Network
Solutions with IP numbers and other information they will need.
There are a wide variety of hosting services available at a wide range
of costs. Be wary of the many "too good to be true" offers. You could be
faced with slow servers, down-time, no support and flash-in-the-pan
businesses.
Great Tools
Once you get your
page on a server, you will want to know what kind of traffic you are
getting. A place like Show Stat, Hit Box, or Site Meter provides that
service for free and gives you very complete statistics. If you just want
a simple counter on your page, FastCounter is a good tool to use.
There are a number of tools you can use to help make your site better.
For example, this free tool will check your site for spelling errors, load
time over the network, meta tags, browser compatibility, etc.
Meta Tags
If you are planning to
enter your pages into search engines (addressed in the next section) so
that other people can find them, you will want to add Meta tags to
your page. The two most common Meta tags let you specify a description and
a set of keywords for the page, respectively, and you can also declare all
sorts of other things. Meta tags always appear between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>
tags of the HTML source. Here are the Meta tags that appear at the top of
the main index page for HowStuffWorks:
<Meta Name="Description" Content="The information and history of Madinah!">
<Meta Name="keywords" Content="Madinah
photos,Islamic photos,Madinah History,Pakistani Community information
living in Madinah">
The first tag is a description for the page. Search engines use this
text directly in their listings. If you don't have a description meta tag,
then the search engine either leaves your description blank or uses the
first sentence or two from your page.
The second tag indicates a set of extra keywords for the page. Search
engines normally index every word on a page, but in many cases you will
not use a certain word, in your actual text, that might be used by someone
searching for your page. If you know that people frequently misspell a
given word, then you might also put the misspelling in the keyword list.
:
There are a number of other tags you will commonly see if you look at
the HTML source of other pages on the Web. Many HTML tools put in tags
automatically. For example, here are two tags that Microsoft Word
automatically applies to a page if you use Microsoft Word to create HTML:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
In all cases, meta tags do not affect the way your page displays in a
browser. The description and keywords tags are the most commonly used
