Creating a Web Site
Putting together a Web site is very similar to carving a sculpture. You start with the basic shape, design the basic page then create all the pages you think you will need. Rough out the links, put titles on the pages, select the main text styles, and create the navigation flow. After all of this is done, start in on the detail of each page. Like a sculpture, if you start with the details, things quickly get disorganized and you lose your flow and organization. You also end up doing more work because of all the things you have to undo and redo.
I learned this lesson the hard way, but, luckily ,pretty early on so I saved myself some work. Once I realized that you could copy pages including links, I made myself a basic page with links and used it over and over again.
I used the Webon authoring tool from AngelFire.lycos.com. At first I tried to start on another site, Teacherwebhosting.com but found that site to be too difficult to use with very little technology support. Since I had no confidence in my ability to create a site, I choose to pay the $2.95 a month for the phone support with AngelFire. It was a great bargain. They answer the phone within three minutes and if you call at the same time of day, you can generally get the same technician you worked with before. The company also has amazing tutorial videos on YouTube that walk you through the basic operations with ease.
After getting on with AngelFire the only real difficulty I had was the time it took to find graphics that did not have copyright constraints, gather material, and organize the materials on the individual pages. It was hard to find graphics that worked together on a page and had some design similarities. I looked for graphics that shared color hue and value. Style was important too, but more difficult to match.
The greatest advantage of a Web site over a sculpture is that when the artist looks at the finished piece, she thinks about all the things she would change. The artist has one choice, start all over! The Web designer can always make changes; the piece is never finished.
