Today we want to talk about your website. Most, but not all, direct marketers sell from their websites. If you are one of the few who dont, I think you still should have a website so people can communicate with you easily and to establish a presence you as a brand. (There are a few people out there who make a very good living in direct marketing without a website, but these are the exceptions. If you model your business after these folks, you may ignore this article.) Your website
With apologies in advance, we are going to have to get just a bit technical to discuss your website. I promise you it wont be too scary. Your website, your web pages are located on a bit of hardware called a server, and this server is operated managed - by some people we call a host. There are many hosts around you may choose from (we shall talk about this in more detail in Article Sixteen). Think of it this way: If you like to write, you spend a great deal of time in front of your PC writing whatever it is you write using Microsoft Word. Word is application software that sits on your computer and is available whenever you click on its icon and open it to use. After you have written something, you save it as a file to your hard drive. You can then open it anytime you want either to edit it or simply read it using Microsoft Word as your application software. Think of a server as a hard drive that sits in a building anywhere in the world, and is connected to your PC by your telephone line your Internet connection. Then think of all the servers in the world as being connected to each other, again by telephone lines. Your web page is stored on your chosen hosts server just as your Word document is stored on your hard drive. In exactly the same way you open Microsoft Word application software then open a Word document when you want to work on it when you want to edit something you have written, you can open a web page that is sitting on any server anywhere in the world. You do this by connecting to the Internet then opening the web page you want using the familiar www.anyname.com address. The application software that makes this work sits on your PC and is called your browser. Everybody else connected to the Internet can view every web page in exactly the same way. There is one important difference between your hard drive and a server, however. While you can edit your Word document on your PC, you cannot edit web pages you view on the Internet you can only read them. (This is a simplification: you can, in fact, edit some web pages sometimes. You do this, for example, when you input your credit card details to order something. We shall discuss this complication in more detail in Article Eighteen.) To make this amazing system work, and work as well as it does, users have decided to work with a standard programming language called HTML (dont worry about what these letters mean). Do this: connect to the Internet then open any web page that comes to mind. In the toolbar at the top of your browser to the left you will see the word view. Click on it and look at the drop-down menu. Click on the word source, and what you see is the HTML code that generates the page you are viewing. Now that you know what HTML looks like, forget it, you dont have to know anything about HTML to build web pages. If you want to build a webpage you need several things (we shall just list them here and discuss them in more detail in Article Sixteen): - An Internet connection
You already have this if you are reading this article on your PC. - A browser
You already have this, too. It came with your computer and you cant connect to the Internet without it. - A host
You will have to find one of these. - A domain name
You will have to choose and register one of these. - Webpage building software sometimes called an HTML editor
This is not as bad as it sounds. - Software to upload your pages to your host
Again, its not as bad as it sounds. I think weve talked about this enough for this article. We shall look a little deeper in the next article. Thats all for this time. See you soon. Next time we shall talk about how you actually build a website (dont panic!). Thanks for listening Copyright 2006 Mary Rice-Johnston & Golden Goose Direct. All rights reserved. |
