A web site is essential to show that your organisation is professional, and to reflect the quality of what you have on offer. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to lurch off into some glitzy software that demands a huge amount of effort and which doesn’t actually meet your needs. Whatever you want to do, the software, as well as the work and cost involved, should match or be capable of being tailored to your requirements.
There are three ways to create a site:
With a business of some importance and with little time to spare, this could be the best option. It’s expensive, but, assuming the developer has a good reputation and understands your requirements, this should give good results.
A website application demands some degree of work, as well as a commitment to a specific package, often involving regular fees on top of the usual charges that you must pay for hosting your site and for registering a domain name.
Creating a site entirely by hand can be hard work, involving a steep learning curve, but it gives you total control of a site and involves no additional costs.
Choosing a website application is difficult, but, having made the decision it’s best to stick with what you’ve selected. This is because most applications store their information in a proprietary file format, preventing the easy transfer of a site.
Both the options below may require a specialist to meet your specific needs, especially for good results on mobile devices. And, while some applications can be bought cheaply, others demand a monthly fee. Fortunately, such apps may include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which improves the visibility of your site to search engines such as Google or Bing.
This kind of platform allows a non-technical user to create a site by means of templates, designs ready for you to adapt. Such an approach is suitable for some businesses, although customisation can sometimes be difficult.
The most common application of this kind is WordPress, a highly popular platform that is ideal for simple sites with lots of content, including small businesses, and which provides more customisation than a website builder application.
This option is ideal if you want to create a simple site, perhaps similar to the one you’re viewing at the moment. The process can become very challenging, however, especially if you want to create a complex site involving advanced user interaction, usually involving programming in JavaScript.
To create a site by hand requires either an advanced text editor or a variant known as an HTML editor. The best option in macOS is BBEdit, which is able to process files both individually and in groups, including the checking of syntax and links for an entire site. It also supports Global Regular Expression search and Print (GREP), a mechanism that lets you search for and replace text patterns, again in single or multiple files.
It’s best to start with a ‘template’ text file for a standard page, with the usual HTML elements at the top and bottom, and then fill in the content. It’s sometimes easier to create the latter with a word processor, perhaps Pages in macOS, and then paste it into the HTML file. You can then add tags around parts of the text as required: BBEdit can be set up to add such tags if you select the text and press a keyboard shortcut. Finally, you can add links to images and other pages as required. As you complete each page you should check the integrity of both your syntax and all the links.
If you want to include picture galleries such as those found on this site, you’ll almost certainly need to employ a third-party application, since these often involve JavaScript. Having created one gallery however, you can then ‘clone’ the results to create further galleries with different configurations, should you be so inclined.
Ideally, only one method should be used to create a site, since moving between platforms may require the manual transfer of files, a tedious and time-consuming task, and almost impossible for anything other than a small site.
Every application uses its own method to store site data. For example, Wordpress keeps its content in a database, whilst other CMS platforms may convey the information in ‘flat’ text files containing Markdown, TXT, JSON or XML data.
If you go to the administration area provided by your host provider, sometimes called cPanel, you can export a site that’s been created by another platform into WordPress form, either directly or by means of a plug-in, assuming, of course, that your provider supports WordPress and that the required plug-in exists.
The exporting process creates a WordPress file in eXtended RSS (WXR) format, based on the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) dialect of XML. Should the original site be hand-coded or made using an unknown application, you could try exporting via a standard RSS file, but, if this also fails, you will have to transfer the content manually.
.xml filename extension, can be opened in WordPress. It contains only the text from your site, which WordPress then uses to extract links and other media from the site itself.The performance of any site is best checked before uploading. Although pages can be viewed locally on a browser, this may not reveal how they behave on the web. Fortunately, you can run a server on your own computer to see how they look. In macOS you can use Simple Web Server or, if you’re feeling ambitious, you could investigate the Apache server built into macOS, although this is rather ‘over the top’ and rather complicated for such a small task.
Once you’ve established the settings for uploading your pages, you can use any suitable utility. In macOS you can employ Transmit, which provides a simple drag and drop mechanism for transferring files and folders to your site.
Having checked the pages again online, you need to take a few extra steps. The first is to double check the validity of your pages. A macOS application called Integrity is ideal for this purpose. Assuming all is well you should then use Integrity to create a sitemap.xml file, which should be uploaded to your site’s top level folder, often called public_html.
Once a site is finally completed it’s a good idea to create a Google Console account and then check this on a regular basis to see the comments that it provides.
The significance of a site in a search engine's list is determined by the ranking of the site. Search engines employ software known as spiders or crawlers to scan everything that’s on the web, examining the structure of each site and the extent to which each is linked to other sites: the more links you have, the higher the ranking. If you happen to have a high ranking in web searches then your site’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is probably optimal.
Typically, a crawler first looks in the site’s sitemap.xml file (see above), but what it really needs to know is that the files on a site are the originals and at the correct location, that they are canonical. If the crawler finds two or more identical or similar pages, it's unable to determine which is canonical and will refuse to index the pages on your site.
One way to make a page canonical is to put a line in the following form within the ＜head＞ part of each page:
＜link rel="canonical" href="https://mysite.org/index.htm"＞Ideally, the link should contain the address of the page itself, a trick known as self-referencing, or it may refer to a higher level page, even the home page. For best results, however, self-referencing is recommended. If your website application doesn’t do this automatically you will have to use some other method to add the lines to your pages.