Building Blocks

I think at this point it maybe a good idea to spell out how crucial it is for all of us to get the basics right, from the start. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is really the virtual address of the actual server (sitting somewhere in the world) that hosts the web page that you are requesting. It’s a good idea to remember that every URL must be preceded with “http://” or “https://”, because all servers that are connected to the internet, that host web pages, work under the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) internet protocol. It could be a secure one (like e-commerce websites, e-banking, etc), and hence the “https://” (“s” for secure). So, prefixing this notation is crucial to hyper linking, which in turn is crucial to the world on online production!

Another nice tip I thought I should share is about the link text. I’ve taken this from Ian Lloyd, Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS (second edition), 2008, who has in turn sourced it from Jukka Korpela, Why ‘Click here’ is bad linking practice:

The link text—the words inside the anchor element, which appear underlined on the screen—should be a neat summary of that link’s purpose (for example, email bob@bubbleunder.com). All too often, you’ll see people asking you to “Click here to submit an image,” or “Click here to notify us of your change of address” when “Submit an image,” or “Notify us of your change of address” more than suffices. Never use “Click here” links—it really is bad linking practice and is discouraged for usability and accessibility reasons.

Finally, here are two articles that I thought may be useful to us.
1) Create Your Own Free Website, is an article that appeared in Brisbane Times in April 2009. This one examines different hosting sites and compares and contrasts the free construction tools available, including Weebly, Wetpaint and WordPress.
2) Link Juice - How to Make People Link to your Website, appeared in The Age on March 16 this year. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is a very important aspect to keep in mind about making your presence felt in the huge online ocean. As easy as getting published seems, getting noticed, amidst the huge clutter of everything that there is on the world wide web, is really a different ball game altogether. To draw a parallel to the paper publishing industry, it is the same as the number of copies printed versus the number of copies actually sold (Nielsen BookScan sort of data), the stuff that makes a book a bestseller; or like in the film industry, the box office rating. This article introduces the importance of getting noticed and briefly examines the “right ways” (a combination of aesthetic and technical prowess) to go about achieving that.