RSS Feed (xml)
Every public Web site has a Web address that distinguishes it from other sites. The address includes a host name and a domain name. The host name is the name of the computer on which the Web server software runs. The domain name is the public name for a group of computers.
For example, the Web address www.EricGiguere.com has the host name www (for World Wide Web) and the domain name EricGiguere.com. In some cases, the address includes additional information after the domain name, but usually the host name and domain name together are enough to locate a Web site. The host name is important when there are two or more Web servers in a domain, but can normally be dropped otherwise. By convention, the primary Web site in a domain uses the special host name www.
Your site will need a Web address, so you'll need to obtain a domain name. Finding the right name is harder than it seems. Ideally, the domain name will directly relate to your site's content, because AdSense uses the Web address as one of its inputs when it tries to figure out what your site is really aboutso choosing a good name is important.
History of the Web
An excellent and authoritative history of the Internet and the World Wide Web can be found on the Internet Society's site, www.isoc.org/internet/history/.
Jumat, 04 April 2008
The Web Address
The Web Server Makes It Public
The Web server is a software application that exposes a Web site for others to see. You can't have a Web site without a Web server, because the server is what a browser communicates with in order to fetch Web pages. Without the server, your Web site is just a bunch of files sitting in your computer that only you can access.
Unlike a Web site, a Web server is complicated to set up and (especially) to maintain. In fact, there are all kinds of reasons not to run the Web server software yourself, even if you're technically inclined. I'll get to that later, but consider this: If I don't run a Web server, why should you? Let someone else run the Web server for you on their own computer. This is called Web hosting and it'll get your site up and running a lot faster than setting up your own Web server.
Web Server Confusion
Sometimes Web server refers to the physical computer that the Web server software runs on, as opposed to the software itself. To avoid this confusion, I always say Web server to refer to the software and server computer to refer to the computer on which the Web server runs.
From Web Page to Web Site
Once you have a Web page, you can build a Web site. Let me repeat this point, because I want to emphasize it: If you can build a Web page, you can build a Web site. A Web site is just a set of pages that share a common Web address. In other words, the Web site is where the Web page "lives," so to speak, on the Internet.
Although single-page Web sites definitely exist, most sites have multiple pages, often hundreds or thousands of them. But such sites are built one page at a time, so don't feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of you. If you can find time to create one or two pages a week, you'll have 50 to 100 pages on your site in a matter of months. Not that you have to wait that longyou can start making money with your site with just a few pages.
No Programming Required
The kind of Web site you're going to build doesn't require any programming. In technical terms, it's called a static site because the Web pages hardly ever change. By contrast, a dynamic site has pages that change, either because the content is updated from a database or because the content is generated by small computer programs that vary the material depending on the viewer. Sites like www.amazon.com make extensive use of dynamic page generation.
Create Some Web Pages
The first step is to create some Web pages. Don't look so dubious Web page creation is not as mysterious as it seems. The basics are easy to understand, and there are many tools (both free and commercial) available to help you. What's hard is coming up with the content for those pages.
When you think about it, the Web is all about content surfing the Web is just looking for stuff. With billions of pages out there, the competition for a surfer's attention is very stiff. The better your content, the more unique and useful it is, the better your chances that others will find it. That's why I'll be discussing creating good content finding something to say and saying it well before getting into the mechanics of actually creating Web pages
Funny Web Destinations
Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number of parody sitesCrackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gatessprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody sites.
Today, everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, humor sites that are static , meaning that the content doesn't change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interestwhich means that to make money from this content you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot, because it will only be popular for a short while.
The reason that a site like Googlefight has some longevity, or legs, is that it draws upon a community effort to constantly update itself (with new examples of humorous juxtapositions). Community participation is a crucial element in many web content success storiesand has the virtue that you don't have to create the content yourself! See "Great Communities," later in this chapter, for more information.
Build It and They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites
"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionallynot alwaysdiscovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site, no matter how good the content of the site is.
And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).
If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs.
To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good contenteither broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other thingsfor example, software applications or jokes.
From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site