A little WebPlus 6

One cannot be thinking about creating a website without encountering Dreamweaver. It is reputed to be one of the top software for creating websites and I got hold of a tutorial which gave me an insight as to what load of trouble I had brought upon myself. I realized that there was more, a whole lot more than meets the eye when it came to websites. Although I just skimmed through the tutorial, I realized one thing and that was, whatever tools one uses to create a website, the one common aspect which one cannot do without is: organization. One cannot just put things together in a hodge podge and hope that things will turn out alright. One has to organize the website into important key elements:

• Landing page
• Navigation bar
• Inside pages

The landing page is the most important page since it is the first thing that greets the visitor to the website. As such, the webmaster has to make a decision if he will put everything on that landing page or to make it simple welcome sign with minimal graphics to make it load faster. The second aspect is the Navigation bar which will guide one's visitors to the various portions of the website. The next part is the pages that the navigation bar points to. These need to be properly organized and structured in order to allow the visitors to the website easy access to everything in it.

I also took a look at WebPlus 6 from Serif Software. They offer a free version which you can download and use without any time limit. A companion tool is PhotoPlus 6 which is a photo editor. I downloaded both without any hassle and proceeded to register for free which was kind of cool. One cannot have a website without any pictures or graphics thus, one needs a photo editor to complement the website creation tool. One reason why a photo editor is imperative when creating a website is that a picture or graphic can cause a page to load very slowly causing today's web surfer to quickly lose interest. With a good photo editor one can lower the number of pixels without sacrificing color and quality as well as use standard tools like cropping and enhancing pictures and graphics with effects. Considering that there are more than 50 million websites in the World Wide Web, one can feel the intensity of the competition to grab the attention of visitors to the website.

One can learn a lot from using WYSIWYG editors and this was one of my criteria for selecting a website creation tool. I looked at a few HTML tools and decided that I was too unsophisticated for them. I needed a crutch and a simple tool seemed like a godsend.

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Web servers

Trying to learn about websites inevitably led me to Web Servers. I did not know too much about websites and how they work but I had the Search Engine to help me locate information so I just Google away. The most ubiquitious web server is Apache and there are a lot of reading materials on it. However, I could sense that it was not going to be easy to tuck under my belt so I look around for something easier to digest. My friend BotP, is a big fan of Apache and I get a lot of inputs from him regarding the Web.

Browsing around a bookstore, I came upon Python Web Programming by Steve Holden. It looked authoritative and, on scannining the pages, I liked the topics which seemed to me well-covered. A cursory inspection made me like it as it seemed to have everything that I needed to learn about how to make automated websites. I had read a little Python before though I never did any programming with it, my philosophy being, 'do it only when you have a suitable project'. So, Python was just there tucked away somewhere in my mind; I liked the simplicity and directness as well as the indentation that also doubles as block scoping, unlike Java which I positively have an aversion for ( with apologies to all who might feel offended. It is just an ignorant fool's opinion after all)..

Steve Holden mentions a lot of neat details like, the Red Hat distribution of Linuz was written in Python, how the Google search engine was written in Python and a number of cool stuff. He also mentioned Xitami, a lightweight web server which he endorses enthrusiastically while presenting his own webserver written also in Python.

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