learningforsustainability.net
Developing your own website
The Internet is increasingly being used by agencies, NGOs and community groups alike to create increased public awareness of issues related to sustainability, share information and develop contacts through international networking. One way to do this is through the use of discussion groups, the other is to develop your own web presence. This page provides a guide to links that will help you find all the resources you need to get started on your own website development. Click on the growing role of the Internet page to see how other groups and organisations are using the Internet and how this can impact on community development.
The good news is that provided you enjoy reasonable access to the Internet, establishing your presence on the Internet need not cost the earth. These days most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer room for a Web site along with Internet connectivity. But a number of places also provide free hosting, and a range of additional services. Whether you're new to webdesign or an old pro, the links below will guide you to free or relatively low-cost resources that will get you started with HTML, help you with site design and promotion, and point you to where you can access the resources you need to build and host your own site.
Here are a range of tutorials to help you formatting your material for the Web. Many sites that provide hosting will also provide free assistance and wizards to help with this, but with these guides its not hard to learn enough HTML to get started.
- HTML Code Tutorial A good place to learn about HTML from the beginning, also features progressively advanced tutorial topics. The site aims to provide the most helpful and complete guide to creating web pages anywhere
- HTML Clinic features step-by-step, easy to understand HTML tutorials, with lots of examples you can follow and learn from.
- The Bare Bones Guide to HTML Probably the most useful guide available to have as a reference when starting out with HTML. lists virtually every tag in common usage, including the Netscape extensions, in a concise, easy-to-use format.
- Choosing colors for your site This simple design tool (Hex Mixer) groups web-safe like colors together for easy comparison and selection.
In general, the best way to figure out how to do things with the Web is to experiment, and to look at what other people have done and how they have done it. Use the
- In Some web design articles PageResources.com provides some links to on-line articles that concentrate on the stylistic aspects of Web page design.
- Writing for the Web A research project about how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages. The studies were done in the SunSoft Science Office during the summer of 1997 by John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen.
- Art and the Zen of web sites Worthwhile reading if you are thinking about streamlining your site ... and quite thoughtful too, as the title suggests.
And finally when your site is up and running .... it's time to promote it. This is perhaps the most forgotton part of site management, but why go to all the hard work of building it if no-one comes and visits.
- Promotion World lots of free information on promoting your website - includes heaps of tutorials, articles, interviews, resources, and much more.
- AddMe this is a similar service which will register your site with the top search engines. Also offers promotion tips and other free services and tools.
And here are links to some of the the services and tools I used in developing this site (just click on the icons to access these resources):
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CoffeeCup - HTML Editor
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Web Hosting by Site5.com
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XML-sitemaps.com
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Robots.txt Checker
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Website keyword suggestions
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Free Search Engine Submission
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RSS submissions
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Internet research tools that are really useful
- PDFgeni Helps you find PDFs that have been written on any subject.
- OpenPDF is another surprisingly useful PDF search engine.
- Digital Library Of The Commons Repository The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. The DLC provides free and open access to full-text articles, papers, and dissertations. This site contains an author-submission portal; an Image Database; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.
More resources can be found at sites such as these:
- Webweaver.nu A great place to find what you want to develop and manage your own home pages, including services such as chatrooms, guestbooks, graphics and all the extras that make a site special, .... and best of all, everything's free!
- Free Center What is good about this site is that each of their listings are sorted by their rank - each site has been individually visited and rated by a staff member.
- Statbrain A good tool for estimating how many visits a site gets each day.