yurdlecity

Monday, December 23, 2002

So how's that webpage coming along? Since we're writing this from the novice point of view, we thought we'd add a few more helpful hints. The first is to be nice to your family, they're the only one you have. After that, here's some advice. As we mentioned earlier, we have not gone to college or had any special training in any of this. That's the great thing about the internet, if you look hard enough, anything you need to know can be found for free. Here's the best piece of advice I received from a website when I was trying to learn html, view source. All it means is that if you see a page with something you like, click on view, then source. This will give you a text view of the site. Try to do a search in the text for a keyword you picked up on the main site. See how they did it and then try to emulate it yourself. Don't steal it outright, you can't learn that way. Sometimes you might have to play around with it a little bit to get it to work and sometimes we got so aggravated that we just gave up and looked for something else. We?ll give you a few of the basic things you need to know about designing a page at this point. There are a few 'tags' that need to be used to set up your page:

- marks the beginning of your page
- marks the end of your page
- is the title (obviously). This is what shows up in your toolbar on your screen. If you have a bunch of windows open, it will expand in a little text box when you scroll over it. <BR>- means you are done with the title.
- is where you put anything that you want to appear on your page. It comes after the title.
- is what you put after your content, usually just before the
-
allows you to jump to the next line
- centers the content on the page
- turns off centering
-
makes your text look nice
-
turns off the
command
- is used to put comments on your page that you don?t want the person reading the page to see. It's done like this

If you want some really good tutoring, go to the Useful tools on the upper right hand side of this page and click on Webmonkey. They have real down to earth explanations of a lot of stuff. Or, if you're lazy like we are, go to the stuff to steal link. Again, once we have our site up and running, we'll clean this up a little bit. For now this is the best we can do.

We're off to design our page now and of course celebrate CHRISTmas. We'll report back when we are done. We're getting into the nitty-gritty now, so it will probably take some time. Our plan is to have a few pages set up and let you comment so that we can get them just right.

Have a nice holiday.

familybusiness 9:00 AM - [Link]
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Now that we have your creative juices flowing, we're going to start talking about what we've done in the really creative area, web site design. Before you start thinking, "oh no, now I have to break out the wallet and start paying", stop thinking. Assuming you already have your computer (an assumption we make since you are reading this), let's talk about 2 ways to build your site without spending cash, only time. They are:

- Find a free host and build your site. Get some experience if you don?t already have any. The free sites are just that, FREE. So why pay when you don?t have to. That?s actually how we created our first site. We then purchased our domain name and had it point to that site. But we got tired of the little pop-up add covering our content, so we went to the paid host. If you want to see what it looked like, go to Our Original Site. It's kind of messed up because this wasn't our actual homepage, but you can't see that one any more because all it has is a link to the new page which you can't see for reasons that will be explained later. The beauty of designing your page this way is that you can have your friends and relatives look at it and tell you what they like, dislike and think you could improve.

- The second way to design your website is the way that we are doing it right now. If you have a web browser, you can create a document in notepad, save it as an html file and open it in your browser. There are 2 ways to do this (probably many more, but we only know 2). Both of these are assuming you have a Windows operating system with Internet Explorer. The first method is to go into windows explorer, select the drive you saved your page on, find the file and double click on it. This will open a browser window and there you will see your page. The second method can be used if your browser is already open. Click on file, then open, then browse, select the folder your file is in, then select the file, click on open, click on ok and there it is.
- We'll conclude this section with a couple of pointers. Create a main folder with all of your web content. This will make it easier to find. Call your homepage index.html. This will make it easier when you upload the file. Also, try to group your content into sub-folders. This will make it easier to find things when you decide to make changes. Also, when it comes time to upload to your host it's a lot easier to select a folder to upload than a bunch of individual files. We have a folder for images and then one for each individual page.

familybusiness 7:00 AM - [Link]
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In the business world you here a lot of talk about networking (people, not computers). As a matter of fact, where I work now the business was founded by a gentleman who networked his way to a multi-billion dollar corporation. But you may be sitting there asking yourself, 'who has time to network?' and 'I don?t know the right people to network with.' It's only natural, I used to ask myself the same questions. The people I hang around with have regular jobs, families and a real life. They don't belong to any fancy organizations or groups. (If you're not thinking these things, congratulations, you're way ahead of the rest of us.)

But we've already discussed how we used networking (more or less) to find a wholesale supplier for our store. Now we're going to give you another example. It involves our vendor's license. While we were putting our 'business plan' together, we were looking at various options. A friend of ours supplements his income by selling merchandise on one of the online auction sites. He has a store there and everything. We had created a couple of recipe CD?s and a couple of CD?s of interesting emails that we had received. Our thought was that maybe we could offer them in his store and maybe auction some off. After discussing it with him, we decided to go in a different direction. We still have the CD's, so maybe once we get going we can offer them as a giveaway. The production cost is about $2.00 each and we know we can lower that.

Anyway, he mentioned that he's working on getting a vendor's license so that he can snag some of the really popular stuff to auction. The cost is about $300.00. We're thinking of possibly splitting the cost. We haven't looked into the logistics and legality of splitting a vendor's license yet, but if it works out, we've cut the cost in half. Still, that takes a big chunk out of our $1,000.00 budget. Added to our initial order of products, we're probably around $400.00 now. But, we have a few months to save up.

The good news, he specializes in toys. Now we have products that the whole company can endorse. There's nothing better than a happy work force.

By the way, we've included our email address on the left side of the page if you'd like to contact us. Just so you know, don't spam us, anything that looks like spam is immediately deleted.

familybusiness 5:19 AM - [Link]
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