Tips for Creating and Uploading Web Pages

Article Summary: This page is not a step-by-step discussion on how to create a website, but rather it aims to give you essential tips on creating and uploading your web pages.

1. Creating Your Web Pages

Important Elements on A Web Page

Page Title (<title>) - Page titles are the titles that will appear on top of your pages. They are also important because search engines use them to provide title page information to your visitors on the search results page.

Headings (H1, H2 ... H6) - There are six levels of heading and heading sizes. The most important heading is H1, the second is H2 and so on.

Meta Elements - The two most important meta information is the keyword and description meta tag. Meta elements (or tags as they are sometimes referred to) are used by web designers to embed your web pages with information such as your keywords, author information, and description about your site. These elements are than used by some search engines to identify and catalog your web pages.

Page Size
The recommended file size for a web page is 30KB to 50KB - keep it smaller if you can. Remember that 80% of web surfers uses 56K modem or less, so keeping your pages small means that these users will not have to wait too long to download their pages.

The suggested content per page is between 200-500 words per page. Most web surfers don't actually read, they scan for useful information. Try not write technical or difficult to read articles. Use lots of bold heading, italics, paragraphs, short sentences, dashes and text breaks - anything to make your articles easier to read. If people see that your pages is loaded with technical information or essay type articles, they'll quickly hit the back button before trying to decipher what it is you are writing.

Graphics
Here are some recommendations for using images on your pages.

Use thumbnail for images that are larger pictures.
Reuse the same pictures, navigation icons or banner on your pages whenever possible instead of putting up new images. Images that are reused are downloaded once and stored in the computers temporary memory. Using a large number of different images will slow the download time of your webpages.
If you want to use background image, make sure that you use Alt tags and title tags to describe you what they are. The alt tag is what gets displayed when a picture is broken or it does not load up at all. The title tag tells the visitor what the image is whenever they move the mouse over a image.

2. Uploading Your Contents

After creating your web pages you're ready to publish them. This process is known as uploading. The most common way to upload your contents is via FTP, the other way is to follow a step-by-step web form which will vary depending on the web hosting service. Once you sign up with a web hosting service and you know where you're going to upload your files to, you will need the following information to successfully upload your files:

Your username
Your password
Your host name that you will need to connect and upload your files to
Your URL or website address

Next: Search Engine Submission