Website Templates

It's been a while since I added anything to this blog. You could say I've been a bit slack in that regard. But that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything!

One area of Quackit that I've seen a lot of interest in over the last year or so is in the website templates section. It seems that many web publishers prefer to download a template than to create their website from scratch. And why wouldn't you?

What exactly are Website Templates?

Website templates are basically a pre-built website that you can use as a foundation for building your own website. The hardest parts of website design and development have been taken care of. All you need to do is customise your template (if you wish) and add content.

Free Templates and Paid Templates

Quackit offers free templates as well as paid ones. The paid ones are labeled "Premium Templates", and are available for those who want to take their website design to the next level.

If you think your website is due for a fresh look, take a look at these website templates now.

More Scroll Box Codes

One of the more popular pages on Quackit is the MySpace Scroll Box Codes page, where you can get copy/paste codes for your MySpace page. Given the popularity of this page, I recently decided to add a few more scroll box related pages. These are:

• Scroll Box Colors - Copy/paste codes for creating colored scroll boxes.
• Scroll Box with Pictures - Codes for adding images to your scroll boxes. This includes images as actual content in the scroll box, as well as background images. Background images allow you to type text over the top of the image.
• Scroll Box with Borders - Copy/paste codes for creating borders around your scroll boxes.

And don't forget, you can make it easy on yourself by using the Scroll Box Generator.

Downloadable HTML Frames Templates

Although HTML frames are not normally the best way to build a website, they can be very useful in some circumstances.

For example, if you need to provide lots of reference information, frames can help immensely with navigation. Frames enable the user to scroll through the navigation independently of the main content.

Frames also enable a second (or third, etc) menu to be populated based on a selection from the first menu.

Because frames can be a bit tricky to get your head around at times, I recently added some downloadable frames templates to the Quackit website. These will fast track the development of your frames-based website. You can download selected templates, or download the whole lot in one go. You can also copy/paste the code directly from Quackit if you prefer.

So, if you need to build a website using HTML frames, check out these frames templates.

4 Essential Web Building Skills

The web has come a long way since it's inception. In the early days, most web pages were static HTML files, each file organized into different levels of headings (i.e. H1, H2, H3...) and a bunch of other markup.

Now, although there are still many static websites around, most medium to large organizations have dynamic websites. These are websites that draw their content from databases. These websites often use scores of different technologies. Large websites often have many different teams working on them, all with different skillsets.

Whether you plan to build large complex websites or smaller and static websites, I can think of 4 skills that stand out as being pretty much essential. Without these skills, you will have a hard time creating and publishing your website or getting a job doing so.

The Skills

• HTML - HTML is the language that allows you to create each web page on your website. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is responsible for the various elements that you see on websites - elements such as headings, paragraphs, hyperlinks, bullet lists, embedded images, embedded music/video files and more.
• CSS - determines how your website looks. For example, for each HTML element on your website, you can use CSS to determine its width, color, alignment, size etc. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.
• Understanding of web hosting and domain names - to make your website available for the world to see, you need to host it on a web server. Web hosting providers make this their business, so you don't need to know all the details about web servers, firewalls etc. All you need to know is how choose the most suitable hosting provider for your website.
• FTP - this is only required when you need to upload your website to a web server (your hosting provider's web server). Doing this allows the world to view it. This is quite a simple thing to learn. Technically, FTP is a protocol (it stands for File Transfer Protocol), but all you need to know is how to operate FTP software.

Don't get me wrong - there are many other skills to learn if you want to become a professional web developer. But these are the main ones you should learn first. These should enable you to get your "foot in the door" so to speak.

One other skill that I recommend learning is how to use web graphics software. Even if you don't see yourself as a graphic designer, a basic understanding of web graphics will assist you a lot in your web development efforts.

To learn more about these skills and other web development skills, check out the web building skills tutorial.

Is Your Website Available 24/7?

One of the main benefits of outsourcing your web hosting is for availability reasons.

Sure, you may have your own web hosting equipment - web server, firewall, high speed internet connection etc. You may also have the necessary skills for hosting your own website. But do you have the inclination to be available to bring your website back online at any hour of the day?

If you host your own website, what would you do in the following scenarios:

• You're at the beach on a Sunday afternoon, relaxing with your partner. Suddenly your pager goes off indicating that your website is down.
• You've just arrived at the supermarket (after waiting in traffic for half an hour). You're about to go shopping. Suddenly your beeper goes off.
• You've decided to take a well-earned break. You're currently on a 3 day bush walk through the beautiful southern alps in New Zealand. Then... your beeper goes off!

And, all of the above scenarios assume that you have a reliable website monitor set up. If you didn't have monitoring, you wouldn't know that your website went down... until you were able to get online and check your website.

If you take your website seriously, then you should be serious about web hosting. I wrote about website availability in my web hosting tutorial. This includes some of the things that can impact the availability of your website.

If you don't already use an external hosting provider, I encourage you to consider it. Hosting is so cheap these days.

Can you afford not to have someone looking after your website 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year?

Is a Domain Name Really Worth it?

If you're just starting out, creating your website for the first time, you might have wondered whether you need a domain name. And if you're trying to build a free website, a domain name wouldn't even be an option.

My thoughts on this? Well, if you really can't afford a domain name, do what you need to do. But, as long as you understand the benefits of having your own domain name. That way, in the future (when you can eventually afford your own domain name), you will know what to do.

Here's a snippet from the FAQ section of Quackit's Create a Website tutorial.

Although it is possible to have a website without it's own domain name, I wouldn't recommend it. Apart from making your site appear "amateurish", there are disadvantages to not having your own domain name.

One key benefit of having a domain name is that it will ensure that your website address doesn't change unexpectedly in the future. Even if you change hosting providers, your domain name will remain the same.

A domain name can also help your listings in search engines and directories. For the small cost of registering your own domain name, the benefits are well worth it.

If you can't afford a domain name, then you would need to either, host your website in a sub-folder of another website (eg, www.othersite.com/yoursite) or tell people to access it using its IP address (eg, http://74.125.19.104). Not all hosting plans will allow you to do this. The best (and easiest) way to go is to simply register a domain name.

So, if you really can't afford a domain name, don't let that stop you from building your website for now. But you should definitely keep in mind the benefits to be had from registering your own domain name.

And remember, once you register your domain name, nobody else in the world can.

HTML Subscript

In my last post, I explained what superscript is and how to specify it in HTML. In this post, we'll look at Subscript.

Subscript is very similar to superscript. You might remember that superscript text is rendered small and above the baseline.

Subscript text, on the other hand, is rendered below the baseline. Subscript text is just as small as superscript.

Subscript text is often used chemical formulas. For example, here's the chemical formula for water:

H₂O

You'll notice the "2" was rendered in a smaller font and below the baseline.

Subscripts can also be used in mathematics to represent the number's base (or radix). For example, if you're displaying a hexadecimal value, you could render the letters "hex" in subscript:

CCCFED_hex

To learn how to specify subscripts, check out this page which explains how to render HTML subscripts.