Web site basics
a guide to Internet hosting

Web site options

This page covers the basics of the Internet. There are several different ways to get online, here’s a few.

• Build your own site from scratch or get someone to build one (Your web site).
• Build your site using music host tools (Host baby)
• Make your pages in a community site using templates (MySpace, Band Camp).
• Make your pages on a retail site using templates (CD Baby).

In practice it can make sense to use several different locations online for different purposes. Most people are on Facebook and Twitter but personal accounts may not be suitable for music. It’s normal for MySpace bands to have their own site too, and although a MySpace blog is OK it’s no match for a specialised blog like WordPress, TypePad or Blogger. Alongside those you might also use a CD Baby page for CD sales and also keep a presence on an upload review site like Garageband.

Depending how you set things up and what you want to do there’s more information on these pages.

• Step by step DIY guide—includes the main points about using the web
• Online payment—taking credit cards or using dedicated accounts
• Your web site—some tips about building your own site
• Search engines—how to make sure people can find your site

Internet services

These are the general features of a web site. To set up your own web site with credit card shopping you would need:

1. an ISP to get online;
2. a registrar for your site name;
3. a web host to hold your web site files;
4. a credit card gateway to take payments.

There are other ways to take payments for mail order, including cheques by post and special coded pages, e.g. for PayPal (Online payment services).

To take payments for downloads you can use Payloadz.

About search engines

There are two kinds of search engines: directories and indexes. Some search engines are a combination of both. It’s hard to place a site in a directory unless it has a single traditional function (such as a record shop). Indexes provide search results based on page structure and word density—they’re good but not perfect.

Directories

Directories (e.g. Open Directory Project) are like yellow pages, organised into site categories. You normally have to put your URL in the right place and provide a description or keywords.

Indexes

Indexes (e.g. Google) make lists of keywords from your pages and use them to respond to searches. They’re compiled by software called crawlers, spiders or robots and they all work in a slightly different way.

What search engines want

Search engines are businesses. They are complex and expensive to run (Google has the largest Linux clusters in the world, with tens of thousands of servers). The main problems they face are:

• the Internet is big and computers are relatively slow;
• they need to stay up-to-date to maintain their reputation and visibility;
• they need to be easy to use and undemanding for the sites they list and rank;
• they have to work with free-format text which can’t be understood by machines;
• their presence should reflect the web and not influence it unduly (the prime directive);
• they need to make money somehow (from sponsors, submitters or searchers);
• site builders are always trying to distort search results in their favour.

It’s an arms race between the search engines trying to be comprehensive and web businesses trying to get more hits. We don’t really know how good they are at what they do unless we compare results. Are there things some engines can’t find?

Search engines that charge are really in the advertising business and frequently suggest sites that have nothing to do with your search. People search to see what’s there, not to see adverts. Google is still the biggest name and gets the most traffic but it is overwhelmed by spam and almost any search assumes you are shopping. Ask is a far better search engine these days. So expect people to use Google but be more selective for your own searches.

As Google has grown its crawl-rate has also declined. The most frequent crawlers (and so the most up-to-date) for this site are now Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.

The Search engines page has more about submissions.

Internet links