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Technical Stuff Many people believe that creating a website is very difficult and you need to know a lot of technical stuff. That's what I thought when I first considered having a website. The more I looked around for good 40k sites and found ones that were just crap, the more interested I became in doing my own site. When I finally got around to looking into the nuts and bolts of it, it turned out that it was easier than I thought. If you are interested in putting up a website, you don't need to know a lot. There are a few things you need to know and to decide, and I'll cover them as we go along. Now, remember, this article is about the technical stuff (to a certain extent) of the website. For more details on content, setup and maintenance, you should read Kenton Kilgore's excellent articles here. If you are interested in creating a site, please read them through. He makes excellent points and tells you how to create a good quality site. Hosting There are a number of companies that offer hosting services, meaning they will let you put your page up on their site. Some of them charge money, some of them are free. While I expect that the ones that charge you money give you good services, I'll let you check them out. I'm fairly cheap at heart, so I wanted a free website. The first place I found was http://www.thegamersoutlet.com. They had come onto a forum where I post regularly and asked for people to host 40k sites. They generally gave me decent service, but I couldn't directly upload to my site. I had to send in my updates for them to upload, which meant that if I couldn't contact them, I couldn't update my site. After several times of not being able to contact them, I finally had enough and left their site. They weren't bad, they just weren't professional enough, in my opinion. When I made the decision to leave, I checked out http://www.warhammer40k.com , which was a hosting site run by Killdrath from the Millennium Gate Forum. It, too, was free and I could do my own uploads anytime I wanted. I was all over that like, well, a guy who is all over something! Now, since I don't have to be in contact with anyone there to upload my files, I also don't have quite as ready an access to helpful information. While there is help available, it's more of a do-it-yourself place, which suits me just fine. (Since I originally wrote this article, they had some server issues and didn't give me any information or notification about them. Eventually, I hosted my site elsewhere since I didn't know when or if they'd go live again. I went with doteasy.com. If you register your site name with them (about $25 per year) they give you free webhosting. I've never had any trouble with them.) Nuts and Bolts. As I said before, you don't need to know a lot about html or programming before you start a website. You can do very well without any coding experience at all, and even better with just a little. Your first option is to use a page-building tool. Sometimes these are provided by your webhost. As an example, warhammer40k.com has one you can use. Different programs have different capabilities, but they will all let you create your own website without any coding. You may even have one on your computer. Word is what I used for a long time. There is a webpage option when you first open a new document. From there, it's fairly easy. You just type stuff in and change fonts and the like when you need. If you want a picture, you have to work with it a little bit, but you can do that, too. Now, that's not to say I haven't had frustrating times with Word when I couldn't make it do what I wanted or when it just didn't do what it was supposed to do. There is another option, which is to know some html. One way to learn html is to View Source on other people's web pages. Go to a web page (this one will do) and right click on it. When the menu comes up, select View Source. It will bring up a text document with all the html code for that page. Just scroll through until you find the part you are looking for (how to make a word bold, for example) and study how they did it. Initially, you may just want to copy that section of their code over to your page, then make any modifications (like changing the text to what you want to say.) Later, as you start to recognize html codes, you may just use similar commands instead of a straight copy and paste. A word of caution: not everyone codes the same way. Some just sort of throw all the commands together at once so it is very hard to follow. Certain page builder software (including Word, I might add) also includes all sorts of data that isn't germane to the web page itself. (Such as information on how many times you changed the text from Italics to bold and back, and other useless stuff.) Disorganization and extraneous information get in the way of your learning, but you can still do it. On the other hand, sometimes you can find fairly well-written code that is laid out more easily. I have tried to do that with my more recent updates (the ones since I learned a bit more about coding on my own.) What I do now, is use a blank page template that has the basics of my web pages labeled and is easily accessible. Go here to look at my template, then right click to View Source. If you'd like, feel free to copy the source over to your own document. I try to space out each html command to make it easier to find separate commands. If you delete my non-html text, you'll have a series of blank paragraphs. You can then type in your information, and you've got a basic page. If you want to add pictures, I'll give you the commands for that a little bit later. When I open up my clean slate page, I simply choose Save As from the menu and pick a different name (that way I'll still have my template for later.) Then I can just replace the text for the titles and each paragraph, then Save the text file, hit Refresh on the new page and see the results. I generally type the original article in Word, then I cut and paste into the text document. Once I've finished that, I make any changes to the rest of the site (such as links to the new article) that are needed. Then I can go to my host site's Manage Your Site section and upload every file I need to add or change. Voila! A new page! (Note: since I switched to doteasy, I got my own FTP client (to transfer the files) so I don't have to go anywhere on the host site, I just pull up the program from my computer and it connects me and I can transfer the files easily. I use CoreFTP, though there are plenty of good free ones available.) Please note, I'm not trying to say I have the best website in the world or that I have super "leet skillz" or anything, just that my html is very simple and I've tried to organize it so it is easy to understand. If you want a few more commands for html, View Source on the paragraphs below. I'll separate each one into it's own paragraph for clarity. Some of these are already available in the rest of the document, but I'll include them here to help you find what you are looking for. If you want to make a link to another page, use this set of code. Simply replace the address inside the quotes with whatever address you want, and replace the text with what you want it to say. If you want to make a word bold, here's how. If you want to include a picture, here is how to do it. Some time back, I switched over to pages with decorative borders, instead of using full decorative screens that were hard on the eyes or really boring pages that were easy to read. There are other ways to do it, but my way is to use the decorative picture/color as the background for the whole page, then create a centered table that is 85% of the width of the page and has a neutral background. Here is the code that I use... Now, you can build it, you have the technology! If you have a website, or create one because of this article, email me and let me know
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duffersetup is the name of the picture file, while Setup is the title you get when you put your mouse over the picture.