Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

I sort of have a strange desire to go out and develop a website so I decided to grab the first book that I saw in the library to tell me how to do it – this book. Look, this book is incredibly basic and is more designed for a small business, or hobbiest, to develop a site based upon their specific industry – the sample site in this book is for a woodworking business (or hobby). The thing is that these days there are a plethora of sites out there which means that you do not necessarily need to construct your own site to be able to run or advertise your business, or participate in a hobby.

For instance we have Facebook and Ebay that enable you to run a business, and then there are the numerous blog sites out there (as well as Facebook, which is a basically a generic, all-purpose, social networking site) if you simply want to write stuff. However, for those who wish to create their own specific site then this book can be quite useful as it does outline a number of things that you need to know in not only creating your site, but also getting traffic to your site.

I remember years ago, back when I was at university and the internet was still in its infancy, I created a very, very basic website where I could post reviews of movies. However that it no longer necessary as I now post all of my movie reviews here:

and, well, obviously all of my book reviews are posted here:

Since I don't actually have any formal money making hobbies (such as wood carving, or selling meat over the internet as one farmer friend of mine does, though he does it over Facebook by simply sending out a post asking his friends if they would like some meat) I don't really have any need for such a site (and even then my extra-work money making activities, such a share trading, would require me to have a license if I were to establish such a site). As for my writing, well there are always the blogs (though I have not got to that just yet). As for any other forms of websites that I have in mind (such as a Facebook for pubs) I would need to create something substantially more complicated than what is outlined in this book.

However this little book still has some interesting things in it that I didn't know, such as how pages are ranked on the search engines and how to construct your page so that it gets the higher rankings. In fact there are computer programs that can be downloaded from the website that enables you to crawl the internet to work out the best terms available. It also have a link to a program called Pagebreeze which is a free webpage developing program (please do not think you can create a webpage using this program:

because, well, that is a word processor and not a webpage development tool.

I also learnt a few things about developing a webpage, such as using tables (which are very common in webpages). Tables are actually the way websites are formatted (though I am surprised that you cannot simply format them the way that you format a Microsoft Word document, but I guess it has a lot to do with compatibility issues). Finally, the other thing that I discovered is that just like our ISPs generally have a cap on the amount of data that we download (and upload) website hosts also have a cap on the number of people that can visit your page, and the more people that you want visiting the page the more you have to pay.

In the end, just hope you do not that the amount of traffic that tends to go through this page: