v1.0 November 2005

Why design a web site?

Why would you want to create a web site in the first place?

There are many reasons:

• To help people;
• Expose unjustices;
• Educate the public or a particular group on a particular issue or subject;
• Keep people up to date;
• Get your opinions out;
• Organize people to work towards one or more goals;
• Network activists in a particular regional area or working on a particular issue;
• Support your community.

Free Web Hosting

Most Internet Service Providers, (ISP's,) provide free personal space for customers to create their own web sites, such as for Bell Sympatico where you will find such web sites for them as http://www3.sympatico.ca/customername .

Some people not wanting their website to be tied in to their ISP look for free website hosts. Here are a few:

• www.brinkster.com/FreePkgLanding.aspx Brinkster (No ads)
• www.cybersoup.com/interface/index.php CyberSoup
• www.freewebpage.org Free Web Page Hosting
• www.freewebspace.com Free Web Space
• members.freewebs.com Free Webs
• ca.geocities.yahoo.com Geocities Yahoo! Canada (upper left hand corner ads)
• oamweb.com On A Mission
• pcifreehost.com PCI Free Host
• free.prohosting.com Pro Hosting
• www.tripod.lycos.com Tripod Free Websites
• xentrik.net/hosting Xentrik Free Website Hosting

• BlogSpot
• Boardhost

Getting visitors to your website

Who you want to attract to your website is dependent about who the website is for.

If it were to be for a one-building tenants association, then you will only care about attracting residents of that one building, probably through direct fliering of each apartment, though you can also advertise it at meetings.

If it is about local issues or issues of interest to a wider geographic region, you can consider putting up posters to advertise the website.

Particularly for issues larger than one building, you may also want to consider getting found easily in search engines like Google.

Getting found through search engines

The key to getting your website found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live, is to have content that people are actually looking for. If your web pages are all about things that interest you but nobody else, people are not going to click on it if it is displayed on a search engine or elsewhere.

If anybody links to your site, the search engines will eventally index your web site. If not you can go to pages like Add your website to Google, to get indexed. It can take up to 6 months to get indexed in may search engines.

If you want to get listed highly by the search engines, one of the most important things you can do is to get as many web pages on as many web sites to link to your website. Google ranks websites based upon their "Page Rank" which is based upon how many web pages on how many web sites link to you and each link is weighed based upon the Pank Rank of that page, but the value is lowered on pages that have lots of links.

Don't try to trick the search engines with things like doorway pages or they will severely penalize your site or delist it altogether. Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase to direct you to that or redirect you to another website. If your site has 20 or more very short pages, typically under 4 paragraphs each, but they can be longer if you have lots of such pages, it will severely hurt your site. A perfect example is a landlords and tenants paralegal site that has taken many acts, and broken them each up into hundreds of small pages, each for one small section of each law, (such as on highway traffic, immigration, land titles, etc.,) and yet they get very few visitors because they have been punished by the search engines for this.

HTML Webdesign Basics

This is a very simple introduction to HTML and webdesign

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is a simple method of coding web pages based upon instructions in triangular brackets such as < and >.

A typical page will be like:

<p>This will be content of your page</p>

</body>
</html>

Most HTML coding instructions have a beginning and an end.

Here is a list of the mandatory instructions:

• <html> and its end statement </html> tells your web browser you have an htm page.
• <head> and its end statement </head> tells your browser this is header information not to be displayed, but used for such purposes as listing the page title, language of the page, etc.
• <title> and its end statement </title> tells your browser to put this information at the very top line of your internet browser screen.
• <body> and its end statement </body> tells your internet browser program this is the part to be displayed on the screen
• <p> and its end statement </p> says this is a new paragraph and puts a blank line after it.

Here are other very common instructions:

• <center> and its end statement </center> makes text
  centered but also forces a page break after the end statement.
• <br> which has no end statement is a line break, telling your computer to start a new line. Additional <br>'s can be added if you want to add blank lines to your page.
• <b> and its end statement </b> makes text into bold. If you forget to put an end statement all the rest of the text will continue to be bold. This is a way to catch coding errors.
• <i> and its end statement </i> makes text into italics.
• <u> and its end statement </u> makes text underlined.
• <font face=arial, sans, Sans-Serif, MS sans-serif, verdana> and its end statement </font>, says you want to make the browser set the viewed text font to arial, or if the viewing computer does not have that then, sans, or Sans-Serif, etc.. Using other attributes to this tag you can be used set to instead or additionally set the size, colour, etcetera.
• <img src="picture.gif"> which has no end statement inserts the image of source filename pictures.gif into this spot.
• <a href="http://www.ontariotenants.ca"> Ontario Tenants Rights</a> creates links to other pages or websites that in this case would look like Ontario Tenants Rights and send those who click on it to the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, often just known as a web address,) to www.ontariotenants.ca
• <h1> and its end statement </h1> makes text into a very large bold heading

  h1 header

  and inserts a blank line before and after it.
• <h2> and its end statement </h2> makes text into a larger bold heading

  h2 header

  .
• <h3> and its end statement </h3> makes text into a large bold heading

  h3 header

  .
• <h4> and its end statement </h4> makes text into a normal sized bold heading

  h4 header

  .
• <h5> and its end statement </h5> makes text into a small bold heading

  h5 header

  .
• <hr> which has no end statement is a horizonal rule that creates lines like:

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