As you can see from page 1, the Webmaster has a lot of Responsibilities and
Tasks to do, to keep a website, interesting, functioning and secure and you thought it was
easy. It takes a lot of hours, days, weeks oh heck years to develop a good website. Not
saying mine is good, bad or excellent, lol, just illustrating what is involved in owning a website.
I have over 800 pages that the public accesses and more 17,200 total files and 10,200 on my Arcade site, it does get to
be a daunting task keeping them updated with fresh content. Plus some content is out of date,
so you remove them and put in new content to replace it. I now run 3 websites Mikescomputerinfo.com,
MikesComputerInfoArcade.com and NakedMetalRestorations.com my son inlaws site. I do these as a hobby to learn more about coding and for fun to keep my mind active. It is fun creating something with code and see it come to life on my computer screen. I also like problem solving and enjoy trying to figure out why something is giving errors, could just be just one missing bracket or quotation mark.
Why do I have Websites, you ask. Well, I used to watch Leo LaPort
on TechTV, he had a show called Call for Help and The ScreenSavers. He kind of inspired me to
give it a shot, WOW, some of my first pages, hmm, hey I was learning. Actually I did some studying
online and bought many books on the subject. I also took a Total Webmaster course at the
local Community College and passed with a 4. grade average : ), slaps self on back lol, I have also been doing
this for the last 10 years, learning something new each and every day. I also
at the same time started messing around with Computers, tearing them apart and rebuilding
them. I even built 5 of my own computers from scratch. I use to do paintings, sculptures, woodworking,
wrenched on cars and made gold and silver jewelry, I needed something for my creative
side and feed my desire to learn new stuff, hence Computers and a Website and my Beautiful
and Loving wife calls herself a Computer Widow, I like doing this, more then I like TV. I love learning new things and
keeping my mind activate and alert, these do that and are relatively inexpensive, (yes
Honey I know the Computers were pricey, but hey, we get a lot of entertainment from them and it was
cheaper to build, then buy=savings lol). Plus, you can not really wrench on new cars anymore, woodworking tools "gone", stop the art stuff years ago. The mechanical side gets to build Computers and to open the Hood or Case and tweak it
to go faster. My Creative side gets to write code and see it pop up on the screen as I look and say
WoW that looks nice, there are many rewards to having a Website, especially when your visitors
send you nice comments and when you are able to help a visitor fix a problem with their
computer, plus, hey, you are on the Internet and the Whole World can visit your Website. pretty
darn cool!
Back to the subject matter and as to why I even created these pages. Well a
couple reasons for doing it. First to give regular Website Visitors an inside look, at what
it takes to Publish a Website for them to use and enjoy. Secondly to give visitors a little
insight into this Webmaster and to give you a better understanding of the ABCs of a Website. Would you like to have your own Website? Did I make it sound to hard and complex? It is and it isn't, if you just want a personal site, you can
always register at a place like MySpace.com or Facebook, pretty easy to put up pictures, post comments
and interact with friends, relatives and other people. That is a simple straight forward
approach, if you have a burning desire of having a site devoted to a special interest
or hobby of yours, then having your own Website is the ticket. The hardest part to
starting your own site is the very first page, the index.html page, you site there and go,
well what do I put on this page, hours later you are still wondering what to put on the page,
lol. Then after you finally get something on the index page or home page, you realize you will
have page 2,3,4 ------, and they all have to be linked together. That is the hard part of starting
a website, content. You can download the Tools and a lot of them are Free, to Host a small site, you may pay
around $5.00 a month, to register a .com about $10.00 to $20.00 a year. You can also get a lot of free graphics and remotely hosted things, such as Guest books, Blog's, etc, on the web, they just require you to link to their site and respect the copyright information. If on the other hand, you would like to create a Commercial Website to sell your products, then it gets a little more involved, actually a lot more involved, depending on the scope of the Website and the number and types of products you would like
to sell. One good alternative for this, is a Yahoo Store or an Ebay Store, you pay a set amount each month and
they provide the Traffic and all the tools needed to setup and run a Store on the Web. On to page 3 were I will discuss Webmastering some more, excited : ).
Alright, we have discussed all or most aspects of Building, Maintaining and Owning a Website. The next phase for a Webmaster is how do I make money and get clients to hire me to be the Webmaster for their Website. This is the phase I am at, how would I do this for a living, where would I find the clients, how complex of a Website would I want to Webmaster. In order to be payed to do this unfortunately you need a Diploma or Cert's to prove you know what you are doing. So for now this will remain as a hobby for me.
So what are my qualifications, well I wish I could say I went to Harvard or MIT, I did put in 2 years
at La Crosse State University, passed a course in Welding at Western Wisconsin Technical College, completed the
Total Webmaster course at the Community College here in town and an A+ Certification in Computer Introduction at the
Mastery Level at DPEC. Plus I have read many books on HTML, PHP and Flash Action Scripting 3, written Java scripts, actually, look around my sites, it has all been done by me, except for applications like the Forum, Arcade, Guestbook, some of those I just redesigned them to fit my sites and is the best representation of my abilities and practices. Remember that this site is designed for new computer users and is enhanced for people on dailup connections, by that I mean, graphics are compressed, pages are designed to be a small in size so they load faster with a dailup connection, even my flash banners are small in size and the header and footer sections are the same on every page, that way once their Browser caches it, it does not need to load it again on the next page or any other page on the site, only the content below the Header of the page. I have also removed most of the tables on the site pages, which also helps with loading times for browsers. I am converted this site to CSS.
Next you maybe wondering what is my setup for doing this kind of work and what Operating Systems are you familiar with. Right now I'm using a Computer that has two 19" LCD monitors, has a Athlon XP 2700 cpu, Geforce FX 5600
Graphics card, 3 gig of ram, with Windows XP Home and a DVD/RW Drive. My other computer has XP Pro installed on it, with an Athlon 64 3500 CPU, Radeon X1650pro 256MB PCI Express x16 graphics card, 3 gigs DDR 400 Memory, DVD/RW Drive. I'm on a cable connection and have a USB HP Deskjet F300 ALL-in-One printer setup for use by all these computers. On other Hard Drives I have Ubuntu Linux, Windows 98. For checking pages in Browsers I use Firefox, IE, and Apples Safari.
Here is a list of Websites I have Designed and Developed:
- MikesComputerInfo.com Hand coded.
- MikesComputerInfoArcade.com Arcade CMS that I have redesigned.
- NakedMetalRestorations.com I really like this one, it is a CMS, Content Management System, very complex but yet a simple system. Many large Websites use these, you have an Administration Panel that controls every aspect of the site. If you make a change it is changed site wide, it has tons of options.