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The Information Highway now reaches into just about every human endeavor, including swimming. It’s a great way to advertise your club, avoid phone calls, and increase membership and event attendance. It’s not that difficult to set up a Web site for your club. Here are some guidelines for getting started.
1. You will need a Web server and a URL (which is the address you give out).Many Internet Service Providers (ISP) allow their users who already have email services to put up a small Web site, free. For example my ISP, Hermes, gave me 5 MG of disk space and the URL:http://www.hermesnet.net/~cwagner. The advantage of this is that it is cheap. The disadvantage is that your URL is probably unrelated to the name of your site.
In order to get the URL you want (such as: http://www.Terrapin.com), you would need to purchase services from a company like Hiway Technologies or run a Web server and register a URL with the Domain Name Service, yourself. To register your own URL can cost anywhere from $25/month, upward so it may not be worth it if you or your club have a limited budget.
2. Build your Web site.
Your Web pages will be written in HTML. HTML is Hypertext Markup Language. It’s a subset of an old publishing standard, SGML, and typically consists of beginning and ending "tags" (for example, <BODY> </BODY>). You can download free HTML editors for different machines and operating systems from many places on the Web. Try running a search on "HTML editors" or "freeware". You may also want to note a good reference for HTML itself.
If you have Microsoft Office 97, you can save a Word document in HTML. Also, you can view or download the "source" (in HTML) for any document on the Web. This allows you to model your page on another Web site whose look and feel you like. However, be careful not to copy something that may cause any type of Copyright infringement.
3. Test your Web site.
Generally your HTML editor will allow you to view your Web pages using Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer so that you can see how they will appear on the Web. You may also want to test them on different machines, since the appearance will sometimes differ.
4. Set up your directories and transfer your Web pages to your ISP’s Web server.
Your ISP will probably give you instructions about where to create a directory and copy your files. You will then want to place your files on the Web server, most likely using FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. You can download FTP programs free from various places on the Web or you may have gotten one from your ISP. (It’s bundled in with Windows 95 or NT.) Once you have transferred your files to the Web server, test them using your Web browser.
Tips.
Be cautious about placing references to other sites on your Web site. If these sites go down or change location, your reference to them will produce an error. This is not a big problem; however it causes more maintenance for you – checking and updating them.
Keep in mind, if you’re using "Frames", that people with older versions of Netscape (1.0 or 2.0) won’t be able to view your site.
Also, if you put a lot of graphics on your site, you will increase the amount of time it takes a user to look at your site. This can be frustrating if they have a slow modem and your viewer may give up and never get the information you want to convey.
Good luck and have fun with your Web site.