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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 6/07/2006 |
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Websites for non-programmers
– a review of Website Tonight offered by Godaddy.com You see a
lot of ads on tv about how you can have a website for your business for less than
the cost of a cup of coffee a month. Of course they’re not talking
about a regular cup of joe, they mean an Espresso coffee served at a fancy
place, maybe with some fancy pastry to go with it, so we’re talking
less than $ 10.00 In the
case of the website hosting and web pages for non-programmers that
Godaddy.com offers, the package consists of a nice web hosting package – a 10
page website, 2 gigs of disk space, 100 Gigs of bandwidth, email accounts,
and the Website Tonight program designed to let non-programmers create a web
site, all for under $ 10 a month.
The
concept of the Website Tonight program is kind of like
paint-by-numbers/fill-in-the-blanks. It provides you with a wide selection of
website templates you can browse through, and then select the ones that you
think would look best for your business. You have a selection of 670
professional templates, so it might take you awhile to pick out something you
like. Then you
begin a guided fill-in-the-blanks procedure, and Website tonight guides and
tutors you through all the pages and features you’re supposed to have
on a website. The tutor
begins with having you create a title for your web page – if you notice
when you go to any web page a title appears at the top of your browser
window, or at least one is supposed to appear. Then the tutor has you create
an email address for your site, a copyright notice, and a subheading that
will appear on all your web pages. This is standard stuff you need to do. Then it
walks you through the many templates you can choose for your site, and the associated colors with them that you can
choose. One you have selected a template and color scheme, you are then
prompted to fill in your company information on the various screens and
templates you’ve selected, to build the content of your website. Once
you’ve done that, you select Publish – and your website is
actually created and published on the hosting site that you purchased with
your package. You can then open any browser – Firefox – Internet
Explorer, Mac,
Opera, whatever, and look at and critique your site. In
addition to the website templates, the package also offers many other nice
features – like RSS feeds, flash intros so you can have snazzy
graphics, .mobi compatibility – meaning mobile
phones can access your website, spell check, password protected pages, java
script support, navigation buttons, hit counter, spam and virus protected
email accounts, backup and restore functions, and many other features that
are useful. Website
Tonight also comes with an online demonstration of exactly how it looks and
works. So is
this going to put website programming companies out of business
? No,
because it’s a good training wheel type start, but you will probably
want to eventually learn website html coding yourself so you can do anything
you want, and not by rote. But
it’s a good inexpensive start to get going with and you can actually
create a nice looking website with it. Sample Website Tonight Site. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2006 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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