Things you should know before starting to build your own website.

First of all you should know that for having a website, up and running, you have to pay for at least two things. Yes, even if you build it yourself.

          1. You have to pay for YourDomainName.com;

          2. You have to pay for someone to host your website.

To start building your website you should know what kind of website you want.

Are you sure you want a website or just a blog?

If you want a blog you can build one for free with Blogger or WordPress.

If you want a website, what will it be? A personal website, an online shop, or other.

Before you start building a website you must establish what type of content you will write and how will you write it.

This will depend on the public you addressed to. For example, if you make a website that contains medical information, you will have to use common language so that people can understand you, not a specific language of medicine.

What about SEO? To have a successful website you have to optimize it (Search Engine Optimization). 

Here's a short website optimization tutorial.

If you made a website to make money online, you should know that is not possible overnight. Making money online is not that hard, but making a lots of money is hard work.

Here's short list of things you should know before you start building your website.

     - what kind of site you want to build.

     - what is the content you want to promote through the site.

     - what name will the website have. is it available?

     - how does the website will look. (I find it more easy to write code if I have a sketch).

     - don't forget that optimization of a website starts once with the creation of the website.

     - what are your targets for the website.

     - when will the website be online.

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Choosing the right image types for your website

In this article we are going to discuss about the types of images that are recommended to use on a website and how to use images when creating a website.

So, what type of images are good to create a website?

Note: If you don't know what type of images exists, you can read this article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats

To create a website it is recommended that you use three types: JPG, PNG, and GIF images if you must.

Why only three type of images? Of course that are a lot more types of images, but these three are the most used on the web.


Lets discuss about these types of images:

     JPG (JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group - full name) this format is used by your camera to save the picture you take. This type of image I recommend that you use for the photos you use to create your website; and by photos I don't mean navigation buttons in your website, for that is another type of image that you can use.

     PNG (Portable Network Graphics) this type of image is best used for your web-site's graphics, and by graphics I mean: images for the web-site's navigation menu, logos, backgrounds, and others images used to create the template of your website.

     GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) a image type that was replaced by the PNG type, but still used for creating websites. GIF images supports only 256 colours and are very ineffective if you have detailed images. I recommend you use this type of image as rare as possible. If you use this type of images, use it for simple images like a line, a bullet or something like that.


How is it best to use images when you create a website.

     - First of all do NOT use big image files on your website. If an image is bigger than 200 Kb do not insert it directly in your web pages, first resize it and then use it. For example if you have photos from your camera that you want to appear on your website,  first resize them and then upload the to your website.

     - Second do not resize your images with HTML code. It is recommended that you add the width and height of your image in the HTML code, but do NOT use this to resize your images. This is a very bad way to resize your images because this actually does not resize the images it just shows them at the dimension you specified but the images are still big and take a log time to load, slowing your website.

width="300" height="200" alt="Your Image" title="Your Images" /> - the width and height should be the same with the image's width and height, not smaller neither bigger.

- Use sprites whenever possible. Sprites are images that contain multiple images. For example if you have buttons on your website that have multiple states, this would be a good sprite:

Sprites are good to be used because they reduce the HTTP-Request of the website which leads to an increasing of the website's performances.

- Compress your images as much as possible. You can use RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) software to compress with preview an image. Compressing your image files makes your website load faster.

RIOT is a free software for image compression. You can find a link to download RIOT in the web building tools section.

This is it with images. I hope this article help you better understand how to use and optimize images on your website or when you build a website.

Questions? Please feel free to comment...

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Building a website

Free tutorial for beginners on how to choose a domain name and hosting for your website.

First of all: if you want to have your own website you have to know that you have to buy a domain name and hosting.

You can buy a domain name and hosting for example: from www.GoDaddy.com or from any hosting company in your area.

Second, you can develop your website locally on your computer, so you can build your website and then buy a domain name and hosting.

Note: I don't recommend using free hosting for your official website. If you want, you can use free hosting just for testing propose.


Before we start making the website lets talk about choosing a name (domain name) for your website.

Choosing a domain name for your own website before you start is better if you already have a logo. You can make or choose a template for your website based on the color of your logo.

When choosing a domain name for your website is better to choose one that is relevant to your activity and not your company's name.

For example your company name is ABCD and you make, for example, candles. Is better for you to have a domain name called www.candles.com then www.abcd.com.

Why not to choose for domain name your company's name when creating your own website?

Let's say you are a customer, wouldn't you search for candles, in our case, or for abcd, the company's name?

Don't get me wrong, if you are a company like Microsoft, Coca-Cola or some other giant in your domain, your website domain name could be the company's name and people will still find you.

Okay if your website domain name is more than one word I recommend you use dashes, because is better for website optimization and can be remembered easier. Here is an example: www.wedding-candles.com.

Now that we determined how you can choose a name for your website, let's view some techniques for creating a website.

     First, you can create a website like I describe in the articles: creating a html website or creating a css website.

     Second, you can download a free template or buy one and build your website based on that template.

Here I will show you how to create a website based on a free template.

Here is a list of website where you can download templates for your website:

     http://www.freecsstemplates.org/ - Free CSS Templates

     http://www.free-css-templates.com/ - Free CSS Templates

     http://www.free-css.com - CSS Resources

     http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/ Website Templates.

     http://www.freewebtemplates.com/

Before we download a template and start building the website, we are going to talk about choosing the right image types for your website.

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