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A Few Tips for Webmasters
Now you’ve done it: You’ve gone ahead and decided to host your own Web site. You registered a domain name, shelled out big bucks for computers and Internet connections, installed and configured server software, and even posted your first home page on the World Wide Web. Your job here is finished, right?Not on your life. Your job is just beginning. For Web surfers, the beauty of the Internet is that it’s available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For Webmasters, the round-the-clock nature of the Internet can become a maintenance nightmare. If your site is down for a few hours or longer or if it goes down for short periods on a regular basis, you quickly lose your audience. If you’re trying to run a business online, these types of outages can be disastrous.The Apache server is extremely reliable, which, along with being free, is a good reason to use it. Problems do occur, however, and you have to know how to recover from them quickly. Make sure that your backup server is an accurate copy, or mirror, of your main server so that you can cut over to it in case your main server fails. You should also make sure that you can log on to your computer from a remote location so that you can do server administration (troubleshooting, shutdowns, restarts) without having to be in the same room with your computer. Your vacation in Fiji will be ruined if the server running your catalog sales company quits working and you have to fly home to deal with it.Often, problems with a Web site occur because of gremlins running around in your Web pages. HTML, the language you use to define your Web pages, is extremely literal and unforgiving. Make sure that you have a good HTML reference and a way to test your pages before casting them on the waters of the Web. Mozilla has a graphical Web page program called Composer, which has an HTML editor that novice Web page designers may find easy to use. We recommend that you use a text editor with at least syntax highlighting to make your coding job easier (see Chapter 10 for some suggestions).Web surfers think of Web sites as places rather than pages. The only way you can keep people coming back to your place on the Web is to change it and update it constantly. Really big sites employ really big teams of writers, designers, and developers who do nothing other than work on the site. Some sites are updated two or three times a day. For a lone Webmaster, updating a modest site once a week is a big job. When you’re planning your site, think about how often you need to update it. Then design your site to make updating it as quick and painless as possible.Our last tip is perhaps our most important: Whatever you do, keep it simple. Updating and maintaining your site’s content is a big job. If you’re going it alone, you have to become a graphics designer, writer, software developer, and system administrator all rolled into one — not an easy task for anyone. If you run into trouble, ask for help. Many people in situations similar to yours are only too happy to share with you their horror stories and hard-earned wisdom. A good place to look for help is Usenet, the Net’s distributed bulletin board, where you can find and communicate with UNIX Webmasters in newsgroups such as Chapter 26 for a listing of UNIX-related newsgroups.)
