WEBSITE FAQs

Q1 :    What do I need for a website?
Q2 :    How do I calculate my bandwdith?
Q3 :    What is the difference between ".com" and ".com.au"?
Q4 :    How to select a reliable website hosting? ?
Q5 :    What makes a website dynamic?
Q6 :    What are the most common files on web servers?

What do I need for a website?

In order to publish the pages that you created for your project, you will need a web server that supports your scripting language(e.g. ASP or PHP).

These are the steps you have to take to build your website

1. Web Design
2. Bandwidth and Web Space Requirements Analysis
3. Domain Name Registration
4. Web Hosting
5. Web Site Promotion
6. Web Site Maintenance

Web Design

People probably are not coming to your Web site to see cool special effects; they are coming to your site for information. Your design, dynamic or not, needs to support their information needs. View more ...

Bandwidth and Web Space Requirements Analysis

Bandwidth:
How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 57,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression.

For a webmaster, bandwidth is the measurement of data that is sent from your web host's server down to the visitors computer. If you have a lot of visitors and they all download large files from you, then you will need a great amount of bandwidth. Calculating bandwidth usage is very simple. It is just the file size multiplied by the number of loads (views). However, sometimes it is easy to forget to include all the files. The main difference between the basic and expensive plan of any hosting provider is the differece in the amount of bandwidth per month. Most hosts will define the bandwidth amount in GB (Gigabytes; 1 GB = 1,000 MB). Below is an easy way to calculate the amount of bandwidth you will need for a month.

Total Bandwidth= visits a day x page views per visit x average page size x 30 (number of days a month)

For most web sites you will not need much bandwidth. Probably 99% of all websites use less than 2 GB of bandwidth a month. If you intend to have a lot of downloads of software, audio or video, then you may end up using a lot more bandwidth. Some web sites like Mp3.com requires an enormous amount of bandwidth, but for the average site a low level will be enough in almost all cases.

Space Requirements:
Web pages are normally very small. This means you can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of diskspace. Images take up more space, unless you have a big database for your web site. Many web hosting plans will offer you large amounts of disk space

Domain Name Registration

The internet connects many kinds of computers either through a service provider or through s direct internet connection. Each computer attached to the internet falls into one or two categories: a host node or a nonhost node. Host nodes are computers used to attach a network to the internet. Nohost nodes are computers that have access to the internet but are not connected directly. The network of your service providers consist primary of host nodes. A home computer accessing the internet via a service provider is a nonhost node.

Every node on the Internet, whether host or nonhost, has a unique Internet number called and an IP address. For example a typical IP address might be 198.105.232.4. Within an isolated network, you can assign IP address at random as long as each one is unique. Connecting a private network to the internet, however, requires using a registered IP address to avoid duplicates. To prevent duplication, an organisation called Internet Information Centre assigns Internet addresses to organisations and individuals that request an internet site.

Domain Name is the unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names always have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. A given machine may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one machine.

Domain Name System (DNS)

Because all the numeric IP address are hard to remember and use, the Internet supports the use of a text name that can be substituted for the IP address. In other words, the Domain Name System (DNS) is the system that translates Internet domain names into IP numbers. A "DNS Server" is a server that performs this kind of translation.

The worldwide system which regulates Internet host names. Each host must have a unique name. Top-level domains in the United States include .com, .edu, .gov, .net, and .org. Two letter country codes such as .au(Australia), .se (Sweden) and .ca (Canada) are used for other countries. Some U.S. sites also have a state and country designation, such as .fl.us.

The following table (table 1)shows the most familiar domain identifier and type of organization. When the internet began, the majority of the sites had the domain identifier ".edu", which denoted educational institutions. By 1995, the top three site types were ".com(commercial)", ".edu (educationa)", and ".net (networking)". Because of a shortage of domain names at the top level, the Internet Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) created seven new top-level domains (table 2).

Table 1: Top-Level Domains Domain Identifier Type of Organisation .com Commercial .edu Educational .gov Government .int International .mil Military .net Networking .org Nonprofit	Table 2: New Top-Level Domains Domain Identifier Type of Organisation .store Merchants, business offering goods to purchase .firm Other business or firms .web Parties emphasising Web activities .arts Arts and cultural-oriented entities .rec Reaction/entertainment sources .info Information services .nom Individuals or families

Web Hosting

A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. This then gives people who surf the internet a way to access your website. The computer that the web hosting company uses is typically just like the computer you have at home, the only difference being that it is set up to serve up web sites and is therefore called a "server". A web host will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

There are basically two primary options when selecting your web hosting platform.

Shared Hosting

Windows based

Unix based

Dedicated Servers

Shared Hosting

This is the most common type of web hosting account and can be very low cost. A shared web hosting account is an account on a web server that hosts other shared accounts. The number of accounts on one shared server can vary widely; some servers host a few hundred, while others have thousands of sites hosted on one server. Hosting your website on a shared server is a workable solution for many small businesses, as shared hosting accounts are priced much lower than dedicated servers.

In most cases Windows 2003 hosting is used when your site uses a programming language called Active Server Pages (ASP) and with or without database connectivity such as Microsoft Access or SQL server. If your site uses just HTML pages, then most likely Unix hosting is your best solution as it is cheaper than Windows hosting. If your site uses PHP as a server-side scripting language, then Unix is your best solution.

Dedicated Hosting

With dedicated hosting you have a full server dedicated to your website. This gives you a lot more freedom and you can host potentially hundreds of your own websites. Typically you will have access to the server just like you have access to your PC at home.

Some of the other important factors when selecting a web site hosting

Uptime: The more uptime your website hosting guarantee, the better. 99% uptime is the minimum acceptable standard.

SSL: If you intend to accept credit card orders directly from your website, you will need Secure Socket Layer included in your plan.

SSI: Server Side Includes are great if you want to spend minimal time updating your site.

CGI Bin: If you do not have access to your own CGI Bin, you cannot install scripts and programs.

DATABASE: What scripts are you going to run? Some programs require a MySQL database to run. If you are going to use MS SQLServer or MS Access as your database, do they provide MS SQLServer or MS Access database support?

Web Site Promotion

Search engine optimization is the act of making ones website content more search engine friendly to make it rank higher. To promote your web site follow these steps;

• Determine the most effective primary and secondary keyword phrases for each page you want to be indexed
• Optimize your page for search engine success by incorporating the primary and secondary keyword phrases into the page content
• Add all required keyword related in your code (meta tags)
• Periodically track your search engine rankings

Web Site Maintenance

The regular attention that you give your site is called maintenance. It is very important unlike a book whose content remains static throughout its life, a website's content can and needs to be updated and maintained to keep users visiting your website.The website will need to be updated, to ensure that all information is current and useful to users.

What makes a website dynamic?

Most Web sites today are relatively static. Once a Web page loads, very little on it changes. DHTML, lets Web designers transform their designs by creating Web pages that adapt and change to meet visitors' needs as they explore the page. A dynamic Web page should meet one of the following criteria

• Interactivity: A dynamic Web site should adapt and react to the visitor's actions as quickly as possinle.
• Synchronicity: A dynamic Web site should bring together relevant information and activities from a variety of sources either directly or through linking with a minimal amount of searching on the visitor's part
• Flexibility: A dynamic Web site should give the visitor a variety of ways to find information or accomplish tasks so that they can choose the method that best suits their needs.
• Adaptability: A dynamic Web site adjusts to cater to individual visitors' needs. Sometimes, this adjustment is made on the server though customisation of content, but much can be done by web designers to accomodate visitors without requiring them on load a new page.
• Activity: A dynamic Web site uses motion and sound to draw attention to change on the screen.

What are the most common files on web servers?

The most common files on Web servers are:

• Web pages
• Images
• Scripts

WEB PAGES

There are two extensions that are standard for Web pages:

• .html and
• .htm.

There is really no difference between these two extensions.

.html

.html was the original extension for HTML pages on Unix Web hosting machines.

.htm

.htm was created by Windows/DOS because of it's requirement for 3 character extensions.

IMAGES

There are two primary image types and one less common image type found on Web pages.

.gif

The GIF file is the CompuServe image format and is best used for images with flat colors. It offers the ability to "index" colors on your images to make sure that they contain only Web safe colors and (with flat colored images) make the images smaller.

.jpg

The JPG or JPEG file format is meant for photographic images. If an image has photographic qualities, ie. no expanses of flat color, it is well suited to being a jpg file. Photographs that are saved as JPG files will generally be smaller than the same file saved in a GIF format.

.png

The PNG or Portable Network Graphic is a graphic file format made for the Web. It has better compression, color, and transparency than GIF files.

SCRIPTS

Scripts are files that activate dynamic actions on Web sites. There are many types of scripts:

.cgi

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. A .cgi file is a file that will run on the Web server and interact with the Web user. CGI files can be written with many different programming languages, like Perl, C, Tcl, and others.

.pl

This indicates a Perl file. Many Web servers will run a .pl file as a CGI.

.js

A .js file is a JavaScript file. You can load your JavaScript files into the Web page itself, or you can write it in an external file and load it from there.

There are also some other, less common file types that you might see on a Web server. These files are usually to give you more power and flexibility on your Web site.

.asp

A .asp file indicates that the Web page is an Active Server Page. ASP provides scripting, macros, and include files to a Web site. It also provides database connectivity and much more.

.php and .php3

This indicates a PHP run Web page. PHP is a content management software that brings scripting, macros, and includes to your Web site.

.cfm and .cfml

These file types indicate that the file is a ColdFusion file. ColdFusion is a powerful server-side content management tool that brings macros, scripting, and more to your Web pages.

.shtm and .shtml

This file type indicates an HTML file that should be viewed with the SSI interpreter. SSI stands for Server Side Includes.

WEB FORM

Web Forms are based on ASP.NET. Working with Web Forms is similar to working with Windows Forms. But the difference is that we will create Web pages with Web forms that will be accessible by a Web browser. Web Forms are Web pages that serve as the user interface for a Web application. A Web Forms page presents information to the user in any browser or client device and implements application logic using server-side code. The extension for ASP.NET is .aspx.