Erith and Crayford Scouts - Making a Scouting Web Site

Building a Scouting Web Site can be an extremely rewarding project, both for you and your Scout Group. Starting to run your own web site for the first time can be extremely hard. This guide to making a web site should help you get started.

Before you start

Before you start to build your web site it is important to plan out what you are going to do. Remember to think about the following:

Why are you creating your site?
- To let your Scouts know what's happening in your group.
- For recruitment of new members.
What do you want your page to look like? This is normally dictated by your reasons for building your web site.
How are you going to make your site easy to navigate?
What content you will put on your web site?
Who will keep it up-to-date?

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Making your first page

Once your plan is made you can begin to start to build your site. There are several ways you can make a web site. The most easiest is using a HTML editor, which writes all the HTML code for you that generates your web page (more about HTML and XHTML below). HTML documents are normally saved as .htm or .html files. There are loads of programs that can write HTML for you. Some examples of these programs are Microsoft Word (97 and above), Microsoft FrontPage and Microsoft FrontPage Express. These programs can be tricky and take a while to get use to, but once your use to using them, you will be knocking out pages in no time.

Pages can be linked together with shortcuts, on the web called hyperlinks. A hyperlink is just a shortcut to another page in your web site. You can normally insert a hyperlink into your document by going to insert => hyperlink. A hyperlink can link to other page in your web site, another web site, or a file, which a user can download.

Getting your pages online.

Once you have a made a web site, you will need to upload your web site to a server. Most I.S.P.'s (Internet Service Provider, i.e. BT Internet, Freeserve) will offer you free web space. You can use this space to host your web site. If your I.S.P. doesn't provide free hosting, there are loads of companies on the internet that offer free hosting. (i.e. ttp://www.geocites.com, http://www.tripod.com). Once you have sorted out your web space, you can now start to upload your pages to your server.

To do this you need a program called an F.T.P. program (File Transfer Protocol). This program will allow you to publish your pages to the internet. You will need to configure this program before you are able to upload your pages. You will normally need to find out there following: your Username and Password for your web space, (if your web space is provided by your I.S.P., it will be the same as for your email login), and your web spaces host address. Once you have configured your program correctly you will be able to upload your pages on the internet.

Domain names

With the cost domain names falling, many Scout Groups are puchasing them for their web site. Please remember to try and keep them in the following format simular to: ecscouts.org.uk

This is the domain for the Erith and Crayford Scouts website. It is easy to remember, as it has been kept in a simple format and also has the correct .org.uk domain. My suggested format is the County/District/Groups name, (hopefully including the word scouts), followed by the correct .org.uk domain.

Getting Flash

It is important to remember when running your own web site not to get too flash. There are many ways to jazz up your web site, with color, pictures, JavaScript's and Java Applets, but you can go OTT. Also, try not to make your web site look tacky, for example by using annoying scrolling marquees to excess.

Remember the KISS rule - Keep it simple stupid!

Compatibilty Tips

When you look at your web site, you are looking at it through one individual browser with one screen resolution. Another person may look at your site, and it may appear completely different. There are many different browsers on the internet, remember that they may not always support the code that you are using on your site!

Screen Resolution
Screen resolution is a setting which allows you to alter the size of objects that are displayed on the screen, the higher the resolution, the smaller the screen image. Screen resolutions include 640x480 pixels, 800x600 pixels (most common) and 1024x768 pixels etc. Remember, to change your own display settings when previewing your web site, you may find that some of your page is un-viewable. A solution to this is to use percentage measurements in table and images. Alternatively you can you a fixed table which the rest of your content appears in, like this web site. All the content is contained in a 600 pixel table. Smaller resolutions will notice it appears flush to the end of the window, higher resolutions will notice a slight gap, either way everyone can view the page.

Scripting
When inserting a JavaScript into a webpage, always put the <NOSCRIPT></NOSCRIPT> tags to provide a message for users who haven't got the compaitbility for that script. Remember Javascript has many versions, not supported by all browsers.

Plugins
When using plugins (flash, shockwave, adobe acrobat etc.), always tell the user that the link will require them to download the plugin to view the page. Sudden pop up messages can alarm users and often if prompted to download something that they don't know what it is they will say NO!

Fonts
Remember when you deciding what fonts to use in your web site, include 3 or 4, the first choice of font might not be availble. Font used on this site are Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif.

Try looking at your site through different browsers and screen resolutions. Try your hardest to make your site has compatible as possible, but remember, you'll never please everyone!

Content Content Content

The most important thing over all in your site is its content. People will only look at your site if it has good up-to-date content. If you agree to run a web site, you must have a lot of time on your hands to keep those pages updated, if you don't people will lose interest and won't look at them.

BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT CONTENT YOU USE.

Names with Addresses, and Telephone numbers. If you need to list a contact, publish an email address instead, always get permission if it isn't your own address.
Never publish copyrighted information.
Never publish your groups meeting times and location.
Never publish pictures, together with the names of the people in them. People can that way be identified, and in such an open area (such as the web), this could be extremely harmful!

If you would like to let people know this information provide an email link, so that interested parties can contact you.

Structure

How you display your text on the screen is extremely important. Try and display all your text in a table. This will allow you to

keep your text in short lines of between 50 - 80 characters. Short lines are easy to read and so your readers attention will be kept

for longer. Always break up your lines into paragraphs and include pictures to make the text, more interesting and easier to read.

Search Engines

Search engines, allow people to find your site. To be added to a search engines database, you will need to go to the search engines homepage, and apply to be added. If your site is accepted, their robots will crawl through your site. They do this by following your links on your site. If your site is in frames, it is vital that your provide links to main pages in your site from your tag, so that the robot can crawl through your site.

Search engines also look for meta tags. These tags which should appear in the head part of your document allow the search engine to take some details about your page.

Pictures

Always use pictures when you are running web site, they make your site more attractive and more pleasant to view. However pictures can slow down your download time, but if your put them in the right web format, they will download quicker. The basic rule is to use. JPEG files (Joint Photographic Experts' Group) for photos and .GIF files (Graphic Interchange Format) for clipart. These two formats compress the pictures and make them quicker to download. Another way of reducing the size of your picture is reducing the colours in the picture.There are two online programs that can do this for you if your graphics program doesn't.

Navigation

Always remember, that if your visitors can't navigate your site, then it doesn't matter how good it looks, its rubbish, because no one can get around it. It's a good idea to have a site index or site map. Try and include a link to this page or your homepage, on every page of your site.

You may also want to include site search. Google offers a free search system for you to add to your site.

As I have said above, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the code you use to write web pages. Most HTML editors write the HTML for you. If you have the time, try and have a go at understanding HTML, it's quite a simple language to learn. It will make you a better webmaster if you understand what everything does, and how it all works.

<XHTML>

XHTML stands for EXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML, used to represent the structure of the web pages data. If you are going to take the time to learn web code, its worth while learning XHTML. Below, is a small example of XHTML.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Erith and Crayford Scouts - District News </title>

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>District News</h1>
<p align="center">Cub Scout Swimming gala...</p>
</body>
</html>

This site will get you started - http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml
This site has now is written in XHTML.

Remember to check your code using the HTML/XHTML Validator.

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is used to define how your web site looks. CSS should be combined with XHTML where XHTML represents the structure of your data and CSS controls your web sites design.

This site will get you started - http://www.w3schools.com/css

. . . building a web site