Barbears House 

So, you've taken a look around and decided you would like to have a go at doing something similar. It's not actually that hard to do so long as you have someone to host your web site, some basic knowledge and the right tools.

We originally setup a web site back in 1998 mainly to introduce Daniel and Thomas to the internet and it was revamped in 2001 as shown in the screen shot below. For the first time Luke appeared as shown in the five faces, but when Sophie arrived we really could not find the spare time to maintain it so it stayed the same until 2010 when this new site came to life.

So how do we do it, first off our web site is hosted by 123-reg.co.uk who we think gives us great service for a reasonable price, it's not the cheapest, but it is nice and simple to set-up and manage. What should you look for in a web site host, well on decision you need to look into is whether you will use any scripting as generally this will cost you a little bit more. We use server side PHP scripting on pages like the Guestbook and Contact Us forms. Next, if you want to get far more technical, then may you want a database for storing things like weblog posts etc, we use this for our Blog and some other things.

Now you have your host sorted, you need to create the web site. There are many editors you can use to do this, but we use Microsoft Expression Web 3 to create all of the pages that make up our web site and to manage all the links and page uploads. A big tip for your web site design is to make sure that people can navigate around easily and most importantly can get back to the main pages including the Home page. People can enter your site at any point via a search engine like Google, they don't always come in through your front door. We have a number of standard mechanisms to support this in the top navigation banner, the left navigation pane and also something I like, the breadcrumb trail just above the left navigation pane.

Once you are all set-up, it is all down to your own imagination, you need to work out the web site structure and read-up on CSS styles, they make creating a web site so much simpler and maintain a nice standard look across the whole site.

We also have a few special pages that use extra scripting using Java, for example the Live BirdCam page to refresh the camera image every few seconds and you can find out more on how all that works on a special technical page we created to take you through it.

That's it for now, I may add some more tips as the web site evolves.