Basic Web Site Guide

This site is a very basic 'beginners guide' to setting up a website in Australia.
This site is designed to be very basic. Feel free to print the page or view it's source.
Where I indicate Google is your friend I urge you to research a topic yourself using a search engine (google being one of the most popular search engines).

Domain Name

A domain name is a simple to type/remember address that you enter to find your website on the internet.
ie. http://webdesign.lorelab.com

Most Australian websites will want a domain name ending in .au
All the information is here: http://www.auda.org.au/about/info/

All you really need to know is that you can goto a registrar or reseller and, for a fee, they will arrange a domain name for you.
ie. goto http://webcity.com.au/ and type your desired domain name (ie. ldesign) in the domain name search box and click search/register your domain.
When this page was created, ldesign.com.au and ldesign.net.au were available at a cost of $34.95 for 2 years through webcity.com.au
There are several domain name registrar's and many reseller's, I have used webcity.com.au in the past on several occasions and have had no issues with them. Google is your friend.

Brief overview of Web Technologies/Languages

Please note that these are my opinions from my experience over the years in these languages and written so hopefully they give someone who doesn't know what all these 'buzz words' mean an idea what they involve. There are 3 considerations/complexities with the technologies .. the first is will they work for visitors to the site .. html, css and any client side technology (especially java and flash which require extra client software) are complex in this regard, different browsers show the same commands differently and it is an art to simply try and make the site look the same on different web browsers, this involves testing and extra code and a certain design philosophy so that if visitors (for example) do not have javascript enabled the website will still function in a reduced mode and not just spam their screen with error messages, the second is are they able to do things, html and css are really the foundation layer of a site, javascript is mostly harmless and typically adds basic effects and python/php/perl/java are there to provide advanced technolgies like database access etc., the third and final question of importance which really applies to the advanced technologies is are they economical to develop, is the code clean, simple, fast to develop, easy to maintain. Python is idea. Perl is cryptic, Java is bloated and overly verbose (long winded) and PHP is the least powerful of these 'advanced' languages, viewed by many as basic yet still awkward and inherits some of the bad from Perl and Java. I don't mind PHP for simple tasks and most web hosting providers it is the easiest 'advanced' technology available.

HTML (and XHTML / XML) are markup languages and really the foundation of the web. HTML stands for hyper-text-markup-language. The idea is that you use tags to identify content and browsers provide basic, automatic formatting of a web page based on the content. I prefer to code to XHTML 1.0 Strict as I believe it is the most widely supported way to write a web page. There is a validator service that can verify if your code is written properly and thus will have the best chance to render correctly. HTML is the basic web page that most other technologies build upon.

CSS works hand in hand with HTML. CSS stands for cascading-style-sheets. HTML is the content and CSS overrides the browser defaults to describe how you want content displayed. Colours, fonts, sizes, layout are all controlled by CSS and ideally kept seperate from the content. This makes it easier to maintain the site, if you want to make your headings different then you only need to change a little bit of code rather than hunt through your site. There is also a validation service for CSS. CSS rocks.

Javascript (which is a seperate language from Java despite the similar name) is a widely supported client side (visitor must have software installed to run the script) scripting language. With careful use it can add basic cool effects and features to a web page yet still allow the page to work if the visitor does not have Javascript active. Most people have Javascript, it is widely supported. There are several libraries available to simplify Javascript (ie. jquery) and using these and code others have written it is very easy to implement features such as lightbox effects with images, clocks, etc. You can even advise people without Javascript how to get it. I know many people who disable Javascript on principle on most sites because it can pose a security risk (it has several times in the past). Javascript is lightweight.

PHP a useful server side language (invisible to visitors to your site) that lets you easily do things like pull together pages from several files and access a database. I think it stands for personal-home-page-hypertext-processor. It is a very basic language designed for the web which has grown and branched out .. I personally find it awkward, after using Python I find the code ugly. PHP is very common and available on almost all web hosts (thus there is a fair amount of software written using PHP+HTML+CSS) and there are several basic things that php does very easily. PHP code tends to be overly verbose (you spend alot more time reading your code than writing it and longer code is harder to maintain) and I personally find that testing PHP code to ensure it is safe takes longer. PHP is awkward and long winded.

Python is my favourite language for many reasons. The least of which (but still very cool) is that it is named after Monty Python. It is also a server side language but has an elegance to it, the code is very high level (close to english) yet it is very clean and brief. IMO it is far easier and faster to maintain and write clean and secure code with Python than PHP or Java. Python is a full language that you can build anything in .. for larger projects Python code is usually 1/4 or smaller than equivalent PHP code and it makes sense to read it. Python can run not only on a web server but also on almost all personal computers and many mobile devices .. you can write 'real' programs with Python and the powerful features of the language carry over to the web server. There is alot of great python web stuff out there but most web hosts only offer basic Python support (ie. Python using CGI .. common gateway interface .. though it is very powerful even in this basic configuration), though over the next few years I anticipate Python will likely replace PHP and Java as a preferred web language as it is a superior yet simpler technology. Anyone who programs alot or works with other people's code loves Python. Python does tend to be slower than other languages but you can replace parts of a Python program with C code to make it extremely fast. Unless your program is doing something complex and mathematical you will not notice the difference in speed between Python and other languages, furthermore the beautiful code is more likely to be written more elegantly .. the algorithm not the language makes the most difference in speed. Python is beautiful.

Java (which is completely different to Javascript) is a language similar to Python and PHP. Java is extremely verbose and very time consuming to program. Python and Java are similar but I choose to use Python instead of Java for many reasons. Java can be a server or a client side technology however if you use it client side your visitors must install a huge download to view the Java code .. and allowing the code to run on their computers poses a security risk. To run Java server side you need special server side software and not many hosting providers (at least at the cheaper end of the market) provide support. Java is bloated and longwinded.

Flash I avoid wherever possible. You can make some very cool sites in flash but I feel it is an unnecessary technology, sure you can make things nicer but rarely is the tradeoff worth it IMO. Visitors have to have an updated flash client installed on their computers to view flash on your site .. they also have to wait for it to download before your site is active and to be honest I am personally sick of waiting while a little animation informs me that a site is loading. I personally disable flash on my browser and only enable it for select sites. Flash (though unlikely) can introduce security issues and has in the past. Flash is unnecessary and slow loading.

Perl is very similar to Python though it has been around longer. Infact Python was designed to be an improved clone of Perl, that you could actually understand. Perl is very common on unix/linux machines and is more a scripting language in my opinion than a full language. The main difference is that Perl code, while easy to write and brief is hard to debug and impossible to maintain someone elses code because it is often long strings of cryptic symbols. As projects get larger Perl gets uglier. Perl is a complex puzzle.

I have left alot of information out of here to try to keep it brief so please google .. and realise that other people's opinions vary from mine. I prefer to program in a specific type of HTML called XHTML 1.0 Strict and make heavy use of CSS and careful use of Javascript. If the site has no complex requirements I find PHP sufficient otherwise I prefer to do anything tricky in Python and replace all the PHP. All the other technologies were good in the past at their time but I find little need to use them as their varied disadvantages almost always far outweigh their advantages.