Question About Making A Website For Your Videography Business
 

I'm going to be making a website for my videography business soon, and I have a few questions. First of all, when I buy a webhost, domain, etc, will I be able to host my videos from the webhost or will I need a separate video hosting account? (I need highquality, no youtube!)

Tell me, for those of you with websites that have video on them, how do you deal with your video, and approximately how much space will I need to host a few videos (no longer than five mintes and no more than maybe 2 or 3 videos) I want to make sure I do this right the first time around, and I don't want to dive right in until I know what I will need to do.

So can anyone explain to me in plain english how the whole process of building a website goes, it doesn't have to be in great detail. And please explain how to put the video onto the website. (Is it a simple uploading process like uploading a video to youtube? Or do i need a special software, etc)

Another thing, do you use already made templates or do you design your own websites? Do you webhosts you use allow you design your own layout or do you have little control over it?

Thanks for your help.

Jenna. I use yahoo small business, They have a bunch of Templates to choose from, they make it real easy to upload pictures and video. It all depends on the package you buy as to how much video you can store, and how much bandwidth you need. There are plenty of choices out there, I pay 11.95 a month for my package. I like this because I can add or change anything at any time at my discrection. It will all depend on your needs.

Wow, very open question. So I will do what I can :)

If you get a decent webhost all of it is under your control at all times. Most will offer 2 ways of making the website, one which is a site building tool that allows someone who has no experience with a website to make one. Or the other is where you code out your HTML or PHP etc and upload usually via FTP to the server and it hosts those for you. I personally hate coding PHP and such so I use Wordpress which is a CMS/blogging software which allows me to focus more on the content rather then the design. There are also tons of themes out there for it plus you can spend some money and get a custom theme made for you if you want.

Addressing the video question, you should be able to host the videos on your regular webhost as long as you are not trying to stream the videos. You can use progressive download to allow your viewers to watch the movie on your page (like you tube) and that works fine with nearly all webhosts. Be sure to ask and read their rules about multimedia. Most only have rules saying you must own the copyright and you also must not abuse the network with excessive use but you really need a popular video to do that.

As for uploading them once again unless you build a PHP site it will not be like youtube. More than likely you will need to compress your video to either, Windows Media, Quicktime, or flash, and them Embed the video onto your webpage. I chose Flash because it is the most widespread and fastest plugin to install for video. I then offer downloadable versions in Quicktime or WMV.

Incase you are currious I use http://www.1and1.com (referal link is @ the bottom of my webpage if you want it) Their Home package is probably perfect for you as it includes plenty of space and bandwidth as well as includes a built in Blog (Wordpress) for eady installing! I have only had to call their support once or twice but it was to deal with getting help on domain transfers but I was able to talk to someone with in a minute or two of holding and they were able to answer my questions quickly which is a huge plus to me.

You will pay for every element of the hosting (I mean-- it will be part of a package, and you can pay more for better packages).

You should be able to find a reasonably priced host that will have plenty of space for videos, yes.

It really depends on what size you want your files to be, so it's not something I can really tell you.

However, I'll note that 100mb is more than enough for a 5 minute clip at very high quality, and you should easily be able to find a host with that much space.

One thing to take note of is bandwidth, not just space.

If you have a lot of people downloading these files, the space might become less of an issue than the allotted bandwidth with the account.

powweb.com and godaddy.com have fairly reasonable rates. There are others that are certainly an option, too.

Just search google for some hosts and see what looks reasonable. You might also want to call some numbers to see how the tech support seems. I use godaddy and their service is quite good, but the tech support is a joke... an hour on hold, and people who just look at their site to try to answer questions. But... it's cheap.

You CAN buy templates or hire a designer, but you don't get this with a hosting account (some hosts might offer some sort of package, but it's certainly not standard).

You will need to learn HTML (and Javascript/CSS/PHP, etc., if you need that sort of content), or use a WYSIWYG editor (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get). A WYSIWYG editor is easier/faster, but also generates code that isn't preferable. It's a better idea to learn HTML yourself. It's daunting at first, but really not that hard once you get used to it.
Personally, I use Dreamweaver but I keep an eye on the code it generates and fix up what I need to or write portions myself.

Uploading will be done through FTP. FTP is a different protocol than HTTP. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is used to view pages, and FTP (file transfer protocol) is used to view the pages and directories much like files and folders on your own computer. Drag and drop, copy, delete, etc.

You can use FTP through Internet Explorer (just type in ftp.yoursite.com), or, better, use any number of freeware applications. I like fireftp, an extension to Mozilla Firefox. (Interface is a bit weird, but it's very good once you get used to it.)

If you don't know what you're doing, you really need to either learn and do it right right way or pay someone who does know because a poorly designed site will really lose you business.

Jenna,

I use www.1and1.com
For 4.99 a month you get two domains, 120gig of space and 1200gig volume a month...

They include a web page builder called Fusion which is easy to use and they also have an online page builder.

Their tech support is suppose to be very good, but I've never needed them.

Check them out...

Bob T.

Bob,

Have you ever had a problem with the allotted bandwidth not being enough? I notice the package you have is limited to 1200GB a month.

Just curious.

No Bruce....I've been with them for two years and I've never been charged for using more than the allowed bandwidth...
Most of the videos I've posted have been in the 50-60meg range so it takes a lot of hits to git to 1200gig...

Plus...they keep increasing it...when I started with them, I think the limit was 500gig...

I know several people using 1and1 and they have all been happy with the service....

Bob T.

1200GB is just fine. That won't run out quickly.

Well if you had a 100MB video the 1.2TB (1200GB) would get you around 12,000 downloads. Not to bad for the price especially considering the next package up is not much (neither is the overage really). That is a really popular video to hit 12,000 Views in a month, If your video gets viral status that can easily happen but at that point, you can make some money off of it to pay for the bandwidth. So if she has 3 Videos @ 5 minutes or under @ 100MB (which should be very high quality) Each video would get around 4,000 views. I have only had a few videos get that popular but you guys might have a better fan base than me :p

try Bluehost for hosting. Cheap and heaps of storage

Currently have two accounts - One for myself (hudorproductions.com) and one for a client (mafekingfarm.com.au), with a third on its way soon...

Listen to this wise cousel. There are two aspects of website design that you have to get right, page layout and browser compatibility. Nothing says amateur better than a bad design that doesn't render properly. There are some sites where you can put your web design work out to bid such as elance.com. Just be sure the vendor guarantees browser compatibility as a condition for payment and make sure it works correctly on IE 6 & 7, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari.

Re content and delivery, there are three parameters to look at - bandwidth, storage space, and throughput. Bandwidth is the amount of content you are allowed to deliver per month. Storage space is the amount of content you can store on the server. Throughput is the amount of data the hosting company's architecture can reliably deliver per second. The way a hosting company is able to provide you with dirt cheap hosting is to put your site on the same server with thousands of other sites. If they are all busy sites they have to divvy up the throughput, making each site appear slow. Fortunately there are thousands of poorly trafficked sites to each popular one. If the hosting company provides good service they will work with you to resolve throughput issues.

How hard is it to learn to use dreamweaver? do you have to have an extensive knowledge of html for a program like that?

For anyone who uses it, can you tell me how it works? Do I design a website on there like I would design a layout in photoshop? (are the two programs compatible?)

Thanks for your answers everyone, i appreciate it! I'm not sure which webhost i'll end up going with, but is the video quality for these webhosts of high quality? I do not want it to recompress my video and turn it into garbage the way youtube, etc. does.

I agree - Remember what business you're in. while it may be fun to design web pages (I do my own) it can be very time consuming for a less than desirable job. If you're intent on doing your own - keep it simple and professional, don't mix fonts and go for fancy flash titles just because you found one that looks cool (it's the same as using 73 different transitions just because they're available)

aim it at your target market, it's there to get you business, nothing else.

If you do go to web designer, look at examples of their work and make sure you are able to make changes yourself (add new videos, change details etc) without have to go back to them and pay more money

Hi Jenna--

We just renewed our yearly subscription with Aplus.net. We ended going with them based on a Cnet rating. (We have the Primo XR service.)

All of the suggestions listed above are really good. But I wanted to stress everyone's advice of making/designing/creating your website, and making it look professional. Our first website was rather too personal, letting everyone know just how happy that we're in the video production business.

For our most recent website, we're still very happy we're in the video production business, but now we've streamlined it for a more business/formal look. Plus, we've been finally able to upload our videos.

(Just an addition, uploading our videos was a mixed bag. It was horribly frustrating, as uploading 15Mb seemed to take forever. Trying/experimenting with different resolutions, export settings, etc. was a major pain. But when it works, and people can view it from the site--it's a beautiful thing!)

Best,

--JA
www.madjavaproductions.com

The idea is that you don't have extensive knowledge of html and use a graphic interface to create webpages. The idea is great and requires little knowledge of html, but very often buggy even with a top of the line program like dreamweaver, and much worse with some of the more buggy apps (whatever you do, don't use frontpage).
I really would recommend having someone, either your or someone else, who DOES know html at least participating in the site, regardless of whether it is all really coded by hand.
There is a strong feeling from experienced coders that WYSIWYG editors are wrong, but that's a bit extreme. However, there is a very good point in that, that people who don't know what they are doing make bad pages without knowing it and have no ability to fix it.
Certainly keep an eye on the code (and learn by doing this if needed) as you go. That will always help.
HTML is really not that hard to learn. If you've used BBcode (like [b] or [i], on a page), then you'll do fine. Just takes some practice.

It uses a GUI as I said to create elements. It's output IS html, but you don't really ever need to touch it if you try not to. It has a preview based layout so you can add elements like a table, or an image, or text, or a link. It's like a page layout program such as pagemill, pagemaker, etc., more than photoshop, though in some ways fairly similar-- like you make things at certain places, can change colors, etc. Certainly more limited than a canvas on which you can draw upon.
Photoshop is certainly not directly compatible with Dreamweaver (though both are now owned by adobe), but indirectly, yes. You can make an image then use it in a page. Sure. Or you can use slices to make a layout then "slice" it into chunks (actual different image files) then put these together into a page.

You do this yourself. They give you space, bandwidth and a way to access it, and you do it all. Compress however you want. Nothing will be automated, so --good-- you'll have full control, and --bad-- nothing will be automated/easy.


I'm a member (actually moderator) of a very good web design forum at www.dynamicdrive.com/forums if you want to ask some specific questions on the subject.
Of course continue here if you have questions for people who have video sites, but that would probably be a more helpful place in terms of actual questions about creating your pages, perhaps later once you've worked a few things out. You can also browse through some old threads and get an idea of how this works.

A frequent misconception of those new to publishing on the web is that there is some complex thing going on. It's quite basic. You have text files (html, etc.). You upload those. The visitors goes to them. The pages are rendered from the code to display stuff. And that's about it. Code can get complex, but it's certainly something for which you can attain an understanding.

Hi Jenna:

I'm a geek, so I build everything myself, that is I have total control of my own failure (or success). I don't use a hosting service, I run my own server at home. My main problem is upstream bandwidth.

I haven't ever used any of the fancy tools like Dreamweaver, my only tool is a normal editor (XEmacs) and that haven't changed for 12 years although my website has gone through numerous itterations since my first page in 1995.

I am one of those that think that WYSIWYG editors are wrong, they may not be today, but they are the main reason that you (still) see so many sites, "designed for Internet Explorer" because the web developers fail to make simple tests of compliance with the HTML standard. You can use the free validator, http://validator.w3.org.

If someone comes up to you and offer to develop a site for you, make sure he doesn't do it in flash. One thing is flash video as on youtube, but the entire site can be in flash. There are very important reasons not to do this:

- Search engines can't index flash sites -> no google references, no business
- You may lock out visitors who can't view content on your site -> loss of business
- You're locked in on that developer for any updates -> expensive maintenance

Don't get distracted by flashy functions, the site may still suck, web developers, I think, still have a habbit of developing (and get away with it) something that looks good, but suck because they don't know your business - and maybe you failed to explain what you want to communicate to who - maybe take a look at www.useit.com

As for hosting videos, there is no problem in delivering videos as any other content, images etc, via a standard web server, but you may prefer to stream content. Streaming means that the user will see the video sooner rather than wait, framedrop is prefered to achieve a continuous presentation giving a better user experience. Further it makes it more difficult to download and save your videos although tools exist.

A streaming media server is usually not included in a standard package. With the higher bandwidth of today, streaming servers are less relevant because there is less risk of data packets getting lost or arriving late.

The filesize depends on the resolution and the compression you use. You may achieve better quality with lower resolution and less compression rather than high resolution and high compression. The low resolution can be blown up in size.

Take a look at stage6.divx.com, they allow you to watch and download videos. The reasonable quality videos I have seen on their site are around 1Mbit/s (935kbit/s video, 96kbit/s audio), so, if your video is 4min. it will be 30 MB.

You may be limited as other notes to certain amount of traffic per month. To figure out if that is a problem, simply estimate the number of visitors/month and multiply with the total storage required, then you'll have a rough idea if that is a problem.

A different problem is the number of concurrent visitors. If you have 100 visitors viewing videos each at 1Mbit/s compression, then in your end you need to have 100Mbit/s connection to serve them uninterrupted. You might find that those that offer a high or no traffic limit have a physical limit on their connection that effectively achieves the same.

All this may have confused you more, hope not. Cheers, Erik

Flash sites don't have to be invsible to search engines. Take a look at:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...6603&sliceId=1

When you read this you'll see there are lots of technical issues involved. The web used to be rather simple. It is not so much anymore and the advice of a good designer is more and more important.

Take a look at this book: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-T...0299853&sr=8-1

Excellent advice.

Also you need to think of a web site as part of your marketing campaign not as your marketing campaign. You aren't going to get work off the site, what the site can do is serve as a resource for potential clients to find out more about your company and see examples -- so first you need a marketing plan.

It may be possible, as google also notes:

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35267

But, I have yet to see it done. I have seen web developers creating a site as a flash application (note, I am not talking flash video), even though the only content on the site was contact details, opening hours and price list. And, it was completely invisible to search engines.

Flash is last century tech, and it should stay there - in last century. There are so many reasons to avoid flash that I can't list them here, and there is nothing I have seen done in flash that can't be done in open/standard languages.

Fortunately, all the Web 2.0 hype is based on standard languages... well, that's a step forward.

I strongly dislike sites in flash for many reasons. They're usually poorly designed too.
I've seen a few cool ones, though. But still have disadvantages like the search engine issue, and compatibility.
More often than not, I look at it as the sign of a bad web designer.

I agree that Flash should not be used for your main site; however, it's a great tool for advertisements and for video playback. Why?

1) Flash works on all major platforms,
2) almost everybody has installed it,
3) there is no need to search an ad or a video player, and
4) it supports "progressive download" which has the benefits of streaming without the need for a special server.

At ColonelCrush (link below), we use Flash for video playback. As I recall, we use 240 kbps for video and 128 kbps for stereo audio. Resolution is 480x270 widescreen. Here's an example: http://colonelcrush.com/movie/index/00150001

If you want more resolution and bits per second, that's up to you. The resolution depends on how the Flash player is constructed. The bits per second depends on how you code the video.

The only drawback is that, unless you're a code jockey, you'll need to hire/bribe somebody to write the software for your player. It's not a big job. Find somebody who has done it before. You only need to do this once.

After that, you can use Sorenson Squeeze to encode your videos as you desire.

If you don't care about playing the video in your webpage, and people will download the files, Quicktime is probably the best choice. It's supported on Macs and PCs. Avoid Windows Media due it poor support on Macs. Divx and other specialized formats are fine for geeks, but not if you want a wide audience. Divx is mostly used by the peer-to-peer (dare I say "pirate"?) crowd. I have no intention of installing Divx on my machines.

I use freewebs.com

The nice thing is that you can design your website for free and if want to pay a few bucks extra, you can get rid of the banner ads & purchase a domain name through them as well. They are pretty cheap.

Jon, Flash is a plugin. As a plugin, it's fine. As the main layout of your site, it's terrible. That's what we were talking about. It does have uses, if you know what you're doing.

Scott, I don't mean this as anything against you personally, but freewebs is a terrible recommendation. It's a complete joke among web designers and certainly not the best deal if you do purchase a better package. It's out there as a gimmick to draw in those who really don't know to look in better places.
Their templates (at least the free ones; I wouldn't know about the rest) are also terrible, not to mention overused.

As an example (and hopefully give you some useful information) about your site:
1. There are an insane number of comments in the code. Messy. The tabs/spacing are passable, but not great. There's even a section of latin test paragraphs in the code (used for testing frequently).
2. Your site isn't valid HTML.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0
Even once you bypass the fact that it can't start checking because of no character encoding type, it has 60 errors. (34 with HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype as it is in the code, but that shouldn't be used. Strict will work better in more browsers.)
3. It uses outdated practices, such as the <meta> tag to set description and keywords, which don't apply to today's version of search engines. Abuse of &nbsp; is also present.
4. Despite your copyright notice, the design, images, etc., are actually owned by Freewebs. You don't really own the right to use them. Just kinda sorta, as Freewebs sees fit.
"Under no circumstances may this template be used on a website that is not hosted by FreeWebs." means that you can't take this site if you ever decide to move, or to stop paying their fees.
5. Freewebs also limits downloads, a lot. I'm not sure if this is better with a paid account, but I'm sure it's not great.
6. Your page is titled "|"... weird.
7. In terms of design the page is simplistic and not very professional (though I have seen worse). Big fonts and such strong colors without much else is not very effective.

Anyway, not a personal attack in any way. I hope this will help you (in realizing that perhaps freewebs isn't really helping that much.)

No offense taken. I don't believe freewebs is a professional web authoring tool but it's free. I pay about $30/year to get rid of the banner ads & pay for the domain name.

I don't expect it to be a great web template without paying a professional web designer big bucks. How much do you think I'd have to pay to hire a good web designer to revamp my site?

Anyway, I've cross checked my website using Explorer, Safari, FireFox, Netscape & Oprah, and the website appears consistant from program to program.

The fonts can be made smaller, but I like them big since I don't have much content on my site, I have to fill in the space, if you know what I mean.

So why do you think freewebs websites have so many HTML errors?

Well, I get that having large fonts makes sense to fill the space, but I'd suggest a smaller layout then. Some can be very effective. No huge issue, though.

$30/yr is ok, but not great. What's the bandwidth/space like?
I pay... let's see... $3.99*12 (hosting) + $7.99 (domain) with godaddy for my two smaller accounts, and got a discount paying first. That's around $55 with no discount and you get a free domain with a new purchase (if you know to ask for the deal).
There are also cheaper places, but I've just kinda gotten in the habit of using godaddy (it's a pain to move servers mostly).

The reason that freewebs has poorly designed templates... well... you get what you pay for. As I said, it's a gimmick that attracts people who haven't found the better options yet.
I can't really make any excuse for them, though. Whether or not the designs are fancy, it's not all that hard to make them valid.

Getting a good designer could be somewhat expensive (but not outrageous if you look around enough), and there are also better templates out there (probably more expensive than freewebs, but look around and you'll find they aren't too bad-- some are even free). If you have the time, there's a lot you could work out yourself, too.

One thing you mentioned is that there is no title for Video On-Sight, it's just an "I" empty space.

I just fixed this using the CSS editor in freewebs.

There is no excuse for the HTML to be bad. Freewebs should fix this. I find that editing my website with Netscape gives the best compatibility across the board. It seems Internet Explorer isn't good when editing webpages. Too many inconsistancies between browsers for some reason.

As far as bandwidth, I get 1GB per month. It sounds small but I hardly use any of it because all my videos & photos are hosted by blip.tv which is a free video hosting site.

I agree about the HTML. That's the major reason freewebs is a joke in the web design world. (Same with most of the free hosting sites for similar reasons.)

1GB is way too small for that price. For $55 (not including any discounts) you can have more than 100x that from many companies.

Free hosting for videos is nice, but aren't there a few downsides?

It's a mess figuring out formats for videos: wmv (Windows Media Video) is supported by default on Windows, mov (Quicktime) on Mac. Flash requires a plugin on both. Divx is really MPEG-4 v2 and may be natively supported. MPEG-4 is also commonly used for vodcasts (video podcasts) so it is gaining popularity on all systems.

Of all these formats, the only one that I can't get working on my system is Flash (which of course also explains why I despise it), I have to download the clip and play it externally. This is because the video is often embedded in a flash application that adds video controls and I need to strip that before I can watch it.

WMV 9 is a direct competitor to MPEG-4 and offers better compression, but is not yet widely supported AFAIK. Beware that there are some "Microsoft MPEG-4" codecs that are not MPEG-4 compatible.

You can create a javascript that check for plugins, if you watch the code on stage6.divx.com they check if divx is installed. Then you can serve the appropriate format. It is not uncommon to see both wmv and mov offered, and even a high quality version for download to view in an external player.

Secondly, it may be worth investigating hosting the video files on one site and the web source a different site. You may find cheap do-it-all-yourself storage with greater bandwidth and less restrictions on bandwidth consumptions - suitable for the video files, and then a different host service with advanced tools to maintain your site.

If this website is for your business I seriously recommend having the site designed and built professionally. It will cost you money but believe me, the difference between most amateur sites and most professional sites is vast!

I was trying in my first post to draw attention to the problem that many "professionals" create sites that are visually attractive, yet suck at reaching your target visitor.

Whether you do it yourself or have it done by someone else, you really need to sit down by yourself and analyse what you're trying to achieve and understand the media and it's limitations in order to avoid such pitfalls.

Visitors spend less than 30 seconds before they decide to go away, if you can't present the information they need in that timespan you loose business. One of the reasons you may not get your message through is bad use of tech.

Simplicity rules, and a do it yourself site may be just fine if you have limited information to present. Think first content, then presentation, then function. If you separate these, you can update presentation without having to change content, and you can add functionality later. And you can add content maintaining a consistent presentation.

Bad developers have a tendency to do the reverse: In order to present something that compels they add functions for no particular purpose, make a flashy presentation and completely forget about content. And worse yet, they may just blend the three things so it's a mess to sort out later. You don't see it because you just see the page as presented by the browser.

Cheers, Erik

Jenna (the thread originator),

For those of us who are just getting into HTML, I'd recommend any of the recent books on the subject by Laura Lemay. She has an inviting writing style that is very accessible.

Also, any serious work should use CSS for the layout and style. Unfortunately, this gets ugly due to differences between IE, Firefox and the rest. The best book that I've found for untangling this mess is Pro CSS Techniques by Jeff Croft, et al. It's not great for learning CSS, but is great at describing the workarounds and hacks needed to get Internet Explorer to behave properly.

As mentioned earlier, Flash is great for embedded video, and Quicktime is great for downloadable video. For portable devices you might need to code in Quicktime and Windows Media to cover all your bases.

For advanced sites (requiring real software skills), you need a database back end. For my money there is no better solution than Ruby on Rails for making custom sites. http://hostingrails.com does a great job as an inexpensive and competent host. InstantRails is the one stop download for all the tools you need - and they're free. http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

With a database, you can implement your own forum, enter your content using forms, have the content automatically published at a certain date and time, and so on.

I've found Java Servlets and Enterprise Java to be much too heavy and require too many pieces to be stitched together for a working solution. Consider this only with a big development team.

I've found PHP to be too light. It's fine for small tasks, but unless you are very disciplined in creating well structured code, there's the risk of creating spaghetti software.

Like Baby Bear's porridge, Ruby on Rails is just right. It's well structured, object oriented and made specifically for web development. All the pieces are right there, and it's powerful and fast. It's also scalable, so it can grow to handle high-traffic sites.

Another good option from the software side is Web Objects. The downside is that it's tied strongly to Apple hardware. Apple isn't exactly the king of the server market. (Rails runs on PCs with Linux/Apache.)

Anyway those are my recommendations, ranging from books for the newbie to the tools for the small (in my case, one man) programming team.

I stopped coding for a while and I just came back to using CSS and i'm quite impressed, it seems that firefox and I.E are kind of on the same page, at least I haven't had any huge problems.

PHP / MySQL are a great solution, no matter how big the project, in my opinion anyways ;)

Hi Jenna:

This thread may be getting out of scope with respect to what you originally envisioned. There are so many ways to do the same and everyone has an opinion - usually, they like what they have done because that's what they know. In particular, when it comes into the technical platform you can get into the crossfire of some fierce discussions - duck! :-) - the platform is really not important as long as it works.

I suggest you sit down and write some notes about what you want on your site, and try to put yourself in the place as a potential client.

First, think *content*. What information do you think a visitor would like to find. Without knowing anything about you or your services, what I would want to know is: What do you do (do you do what I need?), show me a case (prove you can), tell me the price (what did you charge for the case?). Even if my need is different, this gives me a starting point.

Then think structure: How should that information be organized so that the visitor will easily and quickly find it? Think of this: For each action required before the visitor will contact you, you loose 50%. People are impatient, and it is terribly easy to check somebody else.

Then think presentation, this is where you think how your content should appear. Both in terms of elements on the page and colours etc. I actually sit down with a piece of paper in horizontal and draw boxes for each of the elements, to design a site. Presentation may mean you have to reorganize your content, if you get vertical scroll bars, anything not visible in the window when the page loads must be unimportant, few users care to scroll down, in particular on the first levels. Horizontal scroll bars simply indicates bad design and must be avoided at all cost.

If you pay for a developer, a static layout (fixed widths) usually indicates that the developer comes from printed publishing and has no idea about web design. Of course images and videos have fixed widths, but the page as such should be fluid, designed to look best at some reasonable common setup, and look good in all other situations.

Finally, think function, in particular search. Many people, when they don't find what they were looking for on the first page they entered, go straight to search. If your page is well built, you can just use Google directly. When you think function, remember that many visitors may not be seasoned web surfers and can easily get lost in even simple tasks. If you don't need to add functions to do a task, it may be better.

It is not illegal to take a look at competitors' sites, see how they have done it and what they suck at. Again, www.useit.com is really good source for understanding how sites fail to communicate, there is a top ten don'ts, and lots of other tips. It may not make your site look as fancy, but the important thing is communicate your work because that means business.

In all this forget about the platform. Once you've done this, you may start out searching, maybe there is a solution that you can just pull down and use. For your first site, you may just want a couple of pages with no functions, search done by Google and contact is by email (careful not to get your address harvested). In that case you can completely forget about the hosting platform. If not, come back and start a new thread.

Hope this will get you moving :-)

Cheers, Erik

If you use 1and1, be sure to register your domain name through someone else like GoDaddy. I've heard 1and1 doesn't like to release domains very easily.

But I have been using them for two years as a host without any problems, and I have over 10 GB worth of videos on one of my sites that has over 3,000 members and barely do 300GB of bandwidth a month (I've got 2000GB to play with). However the videos that are hosted aren't high-quality.

As soon as I get my other site going (the one in my sig), I'll have HQ videos up then.

If you're looking for HTML editing software, Dreamweaver is good...it's almost like using MS Word, but for web pages. If you're into coding your own pages, you can do that with DW too.

You can also check out websites like Templatemonster where you can pick up pre-made sites where you pretty much only have to "fill in the blanks".

bringing this alive again..
 

Hey again everyone, it's been a while, but I felt like bringing this post alive again, because I'm getting to the point where I really need to make some decisions, but to be honest, I still feel completely clueless. Many of you tried very hard to explain these things to me, but it just didn't quite sink in.

I want to know the step-by-step.

So far, this is what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm sure that I am.

Alright, I find a host (I'm seriously considering 1and1) Q?Do I pay them for a full year in advanced? Can I pay monthly to see if I like it?

Okay then perhaps I want to get a domain, which I can either get through that website, or another website? Is this a one time fee? And how much is it usually.

Say I wanted to higher someone to build me a website, how would they do this? Would I give them full access to my hosting account, or would they somehow send something to me? (I am very confused by all of this)

And the most important part of all of this is video. So far I have no understanding of how this is supposed to work and would love for someone to explain the process of getting my video from my computer, to my website.

I keep reading people say "uploading" but then read that it's "nothing like uploading to youtube". Then what is it like? Do I have to have something separate from my webhost to post my videos?

These are the points at which I am very confused, and until I understand these things better I do not want to even pay for a website.

thanks everyone!

Actually, it's a little like uploading to YouTube.

You usually transfer files to your webhost via FTP. Most webhosts provide a web interface for doing this, which is like uploading video to YouTube, but it's a lot easier and usually faster to use FTP client software, of which hundreds of examples abound.

Also, you need to get a domain registered first. Then you tell your domain registrar where your site is, and the registrar propagates that information through the DNS system. Registering a domain is a one-time fee, and you need to renew the registration every year. This is very important, because cybersquatting will grab up expired domains hoping to sell it back to you.

Once you register the domain, you retain a webhost. Usually, the webhost can take care of updating DNS information to reflect your new site.

A website consists of a series of web pages supported by other software. You can create your own -- it's not that difficult -- but if you want a professional look, you should really employ a web page designer. Once you've got all the files constituting your website, you upload all the files to your webhost at a specific address reserved for you. The main page of the website will be called index.htm (or index.html). That's your home page, and everything will link from that.

With respect to video, everything depends on how you want to maintain it. As you know, video takes up a lot of storage space, so make sure your account with your webhost allows for the room that you need. You'll transcode your video to something compressed -- usually wmv (windows media), RM (real media) or mov (Quicktime) and upload that to your website. Virtually all webhosts allow for streaming the video, i.e. multiple viewers can watch at once. You may, however, have a bandwidth limitation in addition to the storage limitation -- this will limit the amount of data that can be sent to website visitors so, again, make sure your account provides for enough bandwidth to support what you're doing.

Most webhosts allow either monthly or yearly contracts -- as with many businesses, you'll get a discount for the longer commitment.

A quick answer to a few of the questions.

With one and one they normally do a few months payment up to a year. It depends one which account you get. The cheaper the account the more months they require usually. I had a business account and I had the option of 3 month payments or one year. Second, The 1and1 plans all come with one or more domains included so when you sign up for hosting you get to register your own .com or net or org. Hope this helped some.

It's best to register your name with a domain registrar like www.namecheap.com. Then you can use a company like www.hostgator.com for your webhosting. Keep registration and hosting seperate so you can easily leave the host if you don't like the service. If you register your domain with the webhost, you may have issues if you want to leave.

The problems with leaving a webhost could be an issue if you choose a bad one but any good one will provide you will the info on your admin page to leave to another register. I have moved multiple domains in and out of 1and1.

Jenna,

I've had Yahoo. I've had Lunarpages. I've had 1and1.

Yahoo and it's truly easy to use Sitebuilder is perfect for html illiterates like me. About $12/month for more space than I can use. Free domain registration and NO long term hosting plan required. You could try it for a month or two. If you don't like it, it's easy to go elsewhere.

Lunarpages was cheaper for sure. Free Coffecup software which to this day is a total freakin mystery to me. I couldn't get it right when I was with LP. The software was way too complicated to just pick up on. My videos hung all the time on playback. For many I guess LP is great. I didn't care for them or the long term contract they require.

1and1 was as disappointing for me as LP was. Too much hassle for me. I spent hours trying to understand the so-called simple easy to use website designer.

I'm back with Yahoo and although it costs more, I don't have to scream and b*itch because I can't make something work.

I'm telling you. I'm a total moron when it comes to html and all that other website jargon used to design sites. Yahoo and Sitebuilder are perfect for me. I'm not going to pay a website designer to put together a fancy site for me and then be obligated to go through them to get something added or deleted from my site.

In fact, in the time it's taken me to write this post, I could have added a new page with a video clip and uploaded it from my computer to my website.

That's easy.

Jeff

Jeff Emery, I am somewhat familiar with yahoo, but I'd like to ask how easy it is to upload video.

See this is one of my main concerns, everyone is talking about DNS systems, and FTP client software which makes no sense to me at all. Also, if anyone can point me to some articles about doing all of this rather than explaining it yourselves, that would be great.

My fear is that I'll go buy the domain, get a webhost, and then be completely stumped as to how to get my video onto the website. Quality is VERY important to me, There's nothing I dislike more than a youtube quality video.

Would it be easier to actually have a host for my videos, one that I actually would have to pay for, but I'm looking at what will be easiest for me to understand, otherwise it's pointless to have a website if I cannot get my videos up. I know someone who was so confused they just got a myspace and put their videos there, because they had so many problems.