Designing your Web Site Designing a basic web site isn't very difficult, you will either need a design program if you don't know anything about HTML. No knowledge of HTML is needed if you use a WYSIWYG design program, like Claris HomePage, Adobe PageMill/SiteMill, Microsoft FrontPage, Symantec VisualPage and many more... A recent design program called Trellix is very well suited for those who really have never done this and need all the guidance possible to get the result they need. The limited capabilities of such design program will not allow making very advanced and well controlled sites, but it will allow beginners to get their basic sites designed quickly and easily. There are other who have knowledge of HTML and who prefer not using a WYSIWYG interface and instead simply type the HTML script directly, using plain text editors or more advanced editors with macros and other tools to make it easier to type HTML codes without typing every character. Also many HTML oriented editors allow syntax coloring and even warn about possible errors in the script being edited. If you are a beginner and want to design your site yourself, your best bet is to invest in one of the WYSIWYG design programs available on the market, they are usually in the $90 to $100 range and most include the FTP Uploader client to allow publishing of the site to the server. If the design software you chose does not come with a built-in FTP Uploader, then you will need a separate one. An FTP Uploader can be any standard FTP client available out there, many are freeware and can be downloaded from the Internet, and depending on your operating system and platform, you may already have one that came with it, like Windows95 or OS/2 for example. See the Technical Support Area for a few examples of design software and FTP uploaders with screen shots of settings panels for the proper upload settings. If you wish to see such informations for other software packages not included here, don't hesitate to let us know about it, since we can't buy and try out all the software available, we may need to get screen shots from you and we'll add them to our Tech Support area. If you need any help with your site design, we can give you as little or as much help as you wish. We can also design your site for you, to your specifications and at an extremely low rate. Many people have been cheated when they trusted companies to design their sites, these companies charge outrageously high rates when it may not even be necessary for the particular situation. Of course if the site design requires very advanced programming and graphics, people who know what they're doing may be needed to get the job done and these specialists get paid more, but it's not necessary to let them design everything to reduce the overall cost of the site design. Most companies charge from $30 to $100 or more per hour to do web design, and some pages can take several hours to make, sometimes days, when programming is involved. We can help reduce this to a fraction of these costs. So with some good judgment and reasonable decisions, the design costs of a web site can be kept way down and the only cost left is the cost of hosting the site, which is very minimal on orbhost (Check the Rates Page to understand). Many people have no clue when it comes to knowing about how much space will be used by their site. There are several facts to be acknowledged about this. A well designed site must be viewable by any browser on any platform out there, Windows, Windows95/NT, MacIntosh, Unix, BeOS and more... Many people are still using 14.4 modems and probably even 9600 bps in some areas of the world. A web site is accessible by anyone anywhere in the world who has Internet access and catering only the American viewing public is short sighted. Many people turn off the graphics or use browsers that don't handle graphics at all, so these people must still be able to see everything in the site. So graphics must be kept to the right balance, the site must look as good as possible, but it also must load as fast as possible. It seems that the attention span of the average "web surfer" is somewhere around 15 to 20 seconds, and anything that takes longer to load may make them click on the back button or some other link and go somewhere else without waiting for a big page to finish loading. So as a general rule of thumb, try to design each page so the HTML script plus all the related graphics for that page will be kept to a maximum of about 150k to 200k (kilobytes), however, most pages will be far smaller than that. This means that even if all the pages in a site are that big, the basic account on orbhost with 5 Megs (megabytes) of web space, will allow at least 10 pages with their graphics and everything needed. It is much more likely that 80 to 300 pages with reasonable graphics will fit in such 5 Megs account, probably even more.

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