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The aim of this set of notes is to
provide some 'in-depth' guidance for those considering
building a web site for their company.
A web site is your 'window to the world'. Your site should focus
on your (or your organization's) individual needs; it should
engage your visitors, provide clients with information relevant
to doing business with you and should provide a wealth of
resources. This does not necessarily mean information that you
provide; it can be in the form of useful and relevant links to
the web sites of others - Government agencies, Tax Offices,
Industry Organizations etc. Search engines such as Google and
Bing will rate such sites more highly than those which are
'thin' on detail and you will get more traffic and thus more
business.
In the past couple of years, there has been a seismic shift in the
way in which web sites are created and maintained. In
the past, 'web designers' initially used to program sites in a
language called HTML. They then moved to the use of software tools such
as Microsoft's FrontPage to speed creation of web sites. Now, most professional web designers
use what
are known as Content Management Sites software (CMS) to create
database driven web sites. These sites have the considerable
benefit that once established, clients are able to maintain
your own web site, changing content each day if necessary without the need to rely on
or pay others to update content.
The figure below shows an example of a web site
created using a content management tool.
If you would like to visit the site, click on the image below.
Use the tabs across the top to navigate the sit. This site was
built in 30 minutes as the company already had a logo and a copy
of the information that they wanted to put on each page. The
principal of the company was given a user name and password and
using the in-built word processor she is able to change content
at will.
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Example of a CMS - Mitchell Clinical
Consulting. |
Many CMS tools exist and some are listed in the
figure below.
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CMS management tools. |
The
Mitchell Clinical consulting site shown above was created using
Drupal, the first in the list above.
It is relatively rare (and costly) to find Australian based
hosting services for CMS. However, for an
all inclusive fee of around $250 per year, hosting sites in the
USA will allow sites to be built using CMS software. You can register a domain name
(something like
http://www.mitchellclinicalconsulting.net) during the
establishment of your hosting service or you can use an
existing domain name e.g mitchellcc.com.au.
The payment of the hosting fee
gives you access to a control panel which allows you to see
statistics about visitors to your site, upload files, create web
addresses and install of one of the CMS tools shown in the list
above. Installation of a tool such as Drupal is automatic; all
it takes is a single click of the mouse pointer. Your web site
is created instantly and available to the world. All you have to
do is configure it, upload your logo, tell it your mission
statement, tag lines etc.
The figure below shows more examples of CMS sites created using
Drupal. As you can see, the look and feel of each site varies a
lot.
If you already own a domain name and want to keep it, you will
need to keep paying an Australian provider continue the
registration. Example mitchellcc.com.au - is a domain name indicating an
Australian business. The process is slightly more complex than
registering a domain name as you pay the initial hosting fee as
you need to tell the Australian domain name register the location of your
new US based provider.
Note that the US hosting services at
present are not allowed to register .AU domain names.
You may already be using an Australian company to manage your
Internet connection, email, domain name etc. We believe that it
is better to separate internet connection contracts from these web
services. In short, we recommend using Telstra 3G network for
internet access, a local domain name registrar to keep your .au
domain current and a US based hosting service.
Your current email
addresses will automatically move across to the new hosting services.
The first step in developing a CMS site is to plan it thoroughly.
Plan the major sections, think about the pages you want in each
of the major sections and write the copy. It is then simple to
set up a site, whether you do it yourself or you get someone else to do
the basics and you do the editing.
We intend to develop a simple training course showing you how to
act as your own 'webmaster' once a Drupal CMS site is set up.
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