Site builders or DIY

Site builders are available to use on our hosting.

We suggest that these be used as a first step only, and that web masters use them to become familiar with HTML and the features that can go into a web page.

Some site builders are very automated and put the web page content into databases, which is a good facility for updating pages. However the output may not always be search engine friendly. The URLs for pages may look like www.yourname.com/index.php?page_3. A more helpful URL for search engines might look like www.yourname.com/kangaroos.html

Some site builders include a lot of style codes in the web page instead of in separate css files. If a web page has a high ratio of HTML code to text it is less easy for search engine robots to index for key words.

Using a site builder that runs from a remote database gets your website online very quickly, but it should be only the first step.

We suggest that webmasters work towards building websites on their own hard disk using HTML WYSIWYG editors, then uploading the website files using a standalone FTP program. (File Transfer Protocol - software to copy your website from your hard disk to the website host using user ID and password).

Some WYSIWYG HTML editoring programs have a built-in FTP facility. But this can cause problems for the inexperienced.

We have received a few calls where people have copied their website to a sub-directory of the root directory and then not been able to view it. On our Linux servers the index file (index.htm / html / php) should be in the folder public_html. On our windows server it should be in the folder httpdocs.

That's why we suggest a stand-alone FTP program be downloaded. You can see where you are copying the files and are more in control. These programs are either FREE or shareware.