Managing Sites and FTP

>> male voiceover: Alright, for this week,
what we're going to cover.
I'll go into a little bit more detail as to the whole managing
sites bit, and also FTP, I've also got some other things, yes.
>> male speaker: [unclear dialogue].
>> male voiceover: Oh, yeah, pop one
off real quick if that's fine, okay just let them know.
So what we're going to be discussing this week is, today
I'll discuss in more detail this whole concept of managing your
sites and also file transfer protocol how that works.
Kind of dig through and I'll show you what happens if you put
things in the wrong folder or if you drop
something in a sub folder.
Okay, and we'll also talk about the structure of how a lot of
commercial websites are put together, especially hosting.
We'll also discuss some of the places you can get hosting or
what you'll need to know whenever you do need to have
hosting for your customers.
After I sum this up, I've got a packet that
I've put together for you.
The packet is so we can kind of refresh your whole mind as to
the way that we're going to be doing website design and the way
that a lot of other professionals end up putting
websites together.
So there's some relevant skills there.
You'll put together a page with gift tags
entirely coded out by hand.
You'll also use CSS to be able to style it to make your links
rollover links, etc. etc. We'll build on this packet next week
with another packet that I'll give to you that will show you
how to manipulate images and be able to include them in the
layout and also to incorporate some other forms
of web media in your pages.
Ultimately you should be able to
find a transferability of skills.
You may be able to build a website entirely from scratch
based on what I give you from now on.
If you're not able to, it wont hurt my feelings, but you should
be able to go out and find something else that maybe
somebody has created and modify it for your customers purposes.
So that's what we're looking at, we're looking at the
transferability of skills, either the ability to use the
information to create something completely new and different or
to be able to modify something that's
currently already in existence.
So that's what we work on that's the way, or my philosophy of
teaching web design.
Obviously from the ground up, but in addition to that we learn
how to transfer these skills.
So let's go into managing sites to start out with.
That Dreamweaver thing that we had to do last week right?
Where we had to pull the files off of the file server, and we
had to make the changes to all the
files within a designated folder.
After we were done we loaded that folder up to our personal
webspace and we're able to see that page live.
That's one example.
If you end up being a developer for some sort of a company that
does websites all the time, you will have to become proficient
at this and especially if you end up doing more testing for
websites than anything else you'll need
to know how this works.
You'll have to have skill, you'll also have to have some
attention to detail, but in order to do this you'll have to
know what a local and remote host is.
You'll have to be able to call on these terms and to be able to
apply them effectively.
Knowledge of domains is especially helpful.
We'll discuss exactly what a domain is and point out some
areas where you can locate some domains
or purchase a domain name.
Whenever I say web address, URL, and domain name, you can pretty
much assume that they all mean the same thing.
It mean yahoo.com, eiu.edu, etc. etc. etc. We'll also have
some discussion of server addresses as well.
We'll talk about connections and file transfer methods as well,
and in addition to the management of sites we'll also
talk about web traffic gets filtered to these domain names
as well, because one of the things people will probably ask
you when you meet with your customer is they will want to
know how to increase their web rating.
They want to know how can I get my name higher
up on that Google list.
And in the packet that I'll provide to you and in our
discussion today, you'll understand how this process
works hopefully a little bit better and be able to apply it
to a web page that you will put together for them later on.
So let's discuss local and remote hosts.
Whenever we say a local host, what we're really saying is,
where are your files being worked on?
Where are you testing your files?
In our case last week, our local host was our flash drive right?
We pulled the files off of the file server to our flash drive
plugged it into the computer and then all of the testing, all of
the manipulations and changes took place on our flash drive,
so on our local host.
Sometimes we call this our "site root" that's another term that
we use to describe it, or our "root folder."
But it's home base if you want to try
and think of it like that.
As soon as you have everything in that one folder, that's where
it's going to stay.
But that doesn't do you any good if you want to make your site go
live, if you want other people to be able to view your site, in
that case we have to load it up to a web server.
The web server we used last week was pin.eiu.edu right?
That was the web server, that was the location where we were
able to upload our files when we were done designing and
completing our testing.
You'll also hear me call it your remote host or web server.
Those places, are these terms right there, so you'll need to
remember so you'll need to remember the two of those.
Whenever you go through and you're asked for your remote
host, or your server, or the place where all of your files
are going to be loaded up, okay, it's your remote host.
What you will find out is that your space that you have right
now is completely and totally free on EIU's web account, it's
part of your student fees that it is maintained.
However, if you have a customer that says, "I am looking to be
able to host this elsewhere" I need to have another space to
host it okay because you don't get your webspace forever,
eventually they're going to delete it, and you can't host
their website on your webspace.
You can use it for testing, but it ultimately it has to be
loaded up to some other place.
And that hosting is going to vary based on the storage and
also the options that we have.
Gosh, I'm just running them out of the room right now aren't I?
One time whenever I had a class over in the Econ department, I
had to get up and use the bathroom so I thought I'd
politely get up and excuse myself, the instructor chased me
out in the hallway and he just kept nagging me.
He was like "Hey!
Where you going?
What are you doing?
What you think you're doing?"
And I tell you what, from then on I never got
up out of class, I was scared.
And it was the only time I ever did and I can't
believe he didn't do it to anybody else but, gosh!
Freaked me out.
Let's look at some of these web hosting options real quick.
Because you'll probably be asked.
We'll do a generic search phrase in safari real
quick for web hosting.
Now it is entirely possible that your customer may already have
web hosting, that's good, the information that we have or that
you'll need to gather from them to be able to use their website
to be able to make the changes, this will make you more
knowledgeable about that whole process.
So we'll do "web hosting services" here we go.
Wikipedia's got something and they say that they've got a top
10 company and then we've got web hosting, let's try yahoo
let's take a look at what they're providing us with some
of the features.
Here we go, so this will be the space that whenever your
website's done that you'll need to upload it to for them to be
able to use it.
You'll notice that the price that they have right now, it
says 12 months for $7.46 a month, three
months, or one month.
The way a lot of web hosting works is the longer you purchase
it for, the cheaper that they will probably make it.
They've got a lot of other tools that they'll
throw in there as well.
They've got some design tools that we wont necessarily need
because we're going to be using Dreamweaver, but if you're a
novice person you might try these out, I don't necessarily
think that they're the best tools in the world.
Video galleries, they have domain name, which we'll
actually talk about domain names here in a second.
You can also get some email, some data
transfer, and disk space.
Holy cow!
So let's check this out real quick, let's look
at some of these features.
What I'm looking at is the storage space that they have
available for you.
That's a wicked bad cough you got back there man,
you got a stocking hat?
You got a stocking hat or something?
Whenever I was a little kid my mom always used to throw on that
freaking stocking hat and I hated it, absolutely hated.
Okay, well that's pretty incredible.
What I'm looking for right now is the way that these web
hosting accounts will usually work is you get charged based on
the length of time that you have your contract put together for.
Then what they'll charge you for, oh I guess it is, usually
is the space that you have.
For a e-commerce site where you are selling multiple different
items and you have thousands and thousands of dollars of revenue
generating back and forth your website's
going to be pretty huge.
So the disk space you may need in that case would probably be a
great amount, and usually they put these in segments of 10
gigabyte, 20 gigabyte, 100 gigabyte, or 250 gigabyte.
In this case, Yahoo's throwing it out there that you have
unlimited disk space which I find hard to believe.
Let's see if we can find another one real quick.
I know GoDaddy I think still, yeah GoDaddy.com
ever heard of them?
You know what, they get their money from hosting domains and
email, everything web related, so let's look at the hosting
real quick for the web hosting.
Here you go, this is what I'm looking at a little bit more
closely how they'll package it okay.
So in the economy package you're paying for 10 gigabytes of space
on their web server, your flash drive you bought or should have
bought for this class is only 8 gigabytes and you know based on
the files you use that can fill up pretty quick.
Web files are a little bit smaller but for those larger
e-commerce websites that I was talking about, 10 isn't going to
cut it you may need somewhere in the neighborhood
of 150 or even somewhere unlimited.
That blows my mind that they're starting to do unlimited I don't
know how they could do that, because that could be several
and several terabytes.
Well you'll notice as they increase the space you'll
increase your costs, they also throw some other things in
there, some email accounts, some SQL databases, which we won't
get into my SQL in this course, probably if you decide to take
it in graduate courses in this program SQL is a big big thing.
It's a way to be able to manage the data and information for
your website to be able to collect it.
But websites like Yahoo, websites like GoDaddy and there
are some other ones that are available out there where you
will pay for the space that you put your website onto for them
to host it, that's the whole idea.
For your website, if it's on your flash drive it's not doing
you any good, but whenever you pay for this account, pay for
this space it makes it go live and it can
be accessed from anywhere.
That's what you're paying for in this case.
So these are some of the hosting options.
If your customer doesn't have any money you can rely on free
web hosting options.
Here we go,...alright so that probably wasn't it.
Here we go, webs.com this is a very popular one that I know a
lot of people end up using for their website.
They do have free options, the problems with using the free
options for these web hosting sites is that usually they'll
want to put some sort of an advertisement on your page,
they'll want some sort of a header across that says,
"Hey buy this acai berry!"
Or something like that, and lose 40 pounds, or "I got ripped
using this muscle fuel," or something to that affect.
We've all seen the ads, we kind of get it.
That's what you do have the issues with the webs.
But you can create all of your work in dreamweaver and you can
upload them up to these spaces.
But usually these do not have any sort of domain associated
with them, they assign you the domain right here.
But that's another option if you're looking
for free web hosting space.
Maybe talk to your customer see what they have, see if they're
willing to shell out a little bit of money, or maybe find out
who they've got their hosting through right now.
So that's your remote host for you.
Now associated with that remote host, is this other term that we
use, called our domain.
The domain name is a name that's used as an
identifier for a particular site.
URL or web address, we're all familiar with those terms.
Whenever you buy a domain or you get a domain it usually has some
sort of an extension associated with it, you have a .edu which
stands for education.
Or a .gov, or .com, or .org, these extensions really just
sort of describe the entity or the place where the domain
should be affiliated with.
Usually if you see a .org you know that, hey this is probably
a non-for profit organization, or some sort of a professional
entity that has certain standards available
for us to be able to look at.
We see .com it is commercial website usually, that's what we
associate it with, we see the .gov for government websites,
.edu for education.
One thing I will tell you though is I think that there used to be
pretty strict restrictions of who could have these domain
names and who could have these particular extensions you can
literally get anything that you want now providing that you
shell out the cash for it.
And you're going to find out that the registration ranges
from inexpensive to very very costly.
And I'll show you in GoDaddy's domain name search too,
especially if you're customer doesn't have any sort of website
now but they want to buy their domain name, how to use it, some
of the options that you can have, you'll see
some of the pricing as well.
Alright, let me break out of here real
quick, and take a look.
We'll swing back into GoDaddy.
So here's what they're showing you right now on this page, you
can start searching immediately and click the
drop down to look at all those different extensions,
there's a lot of them.
A lot of them are referring to countries or continents, I think
.eiu is Europe.
I have not stayed up to date on all of these to
be perfectly honest with you.
We've got .ork for the U.K.
United Kingdom, .mobi for mobile devices, which has become a very
popular thing to have not only your main website but also have
a website for your mobile site, for people with Blackberrys or
iPods or iPads or anything like that.
They will show some pricing per year that you're looking at
here, but I don't really go off of this chart too much I usually
throw in the domain search right here.
Let's go ahead and throw one out here as an example and if you
payed attention to the news there is relevance to why I'm
throwing this up here.
So thedallascowboys.com, it says the name has already been taken,
use domain buy to get this name, but they will throw some other
options down here for you.
I'll show you how much they are.
It's usually a purchase for one year for your domain name.
One thing I will say about your domain name is that whenever you
purchase it and you have it, let's say you start out using
one hosting service, you start out using GoDaddy and you're not
at all pleased with the fact that their servers are down all
the time or you're not getting a whole heck of a
lot of traffic or the tools are difficult to use.
You can cancel your service, your hosting service for this
instance, from GoDaddy and then go purchase hosting from Yahoo,
as an example, and transfer your domain name.
So that's actually a really common thing that people do, if
they're not pleased with the hosting service that they have
right now they transfer their domain name to a different
hosting service.
The example that I can tell you that's relevant to me and could
be relevant to you as well, is there's a church up here on the
north side of town, the Presbyterian church,
kind of got that wild limestone architecture.
Have you ever seen it?
It's up there next to "What's Cooking?"
No?
You ought to check it out.
Yeah, "What's Cooking?"
they got good food, they got good omelets.
What's that?
No, Sunday morning's not bad, but I mean it's
not a bad little shop.
But I was called over there because they had a problem with
their website, they were trying to make updates, they were
trying to make changes to it, and they were doing everything
right, and they were connected properly but none of the changes
were going through.
There was a problem with their web hosting, they were kind of
sick of it and they said, "I don't want this web hosting
anymore, I don't even know who this is."
Turns out it was some online company from California, didn't
even have a phone number for you to be able
to call to get a hold of anybody.
So they said, "Well, we're going to dump this hosting, let's dump
this hosting."
So in this case they called the local service provider,
Consolidated, you might get your internet or TV, they also do web
hosting, and they transferred their domain name and their
website to the hosting on Consolidated servers.
Soon as they did that they were up and
going and everything was working.
So as soon as you own that domain name, you can transfer it
to any hosting space that you want.
All it is is just a name that associates it with the file or
the location of where it has been saved at.
The reason that I throw this example up here for you with the
dallascowboys.com as a domain name is because, did any of you
pay attention to the news last fall or anything like that?
Anything special about the Cowboys?
Other than Tony Romo just being horribly
horribly overrated, right?
He's absolutely just, well I don't dig the dude but whatever.
But somebody got lax in their web office and they weren't
paying attention, and whenever you entered the domain name back
in I think October or November, their website wasn't popping up,
and the reason for that is because they didn't re-register
their domain name.
So theoretically it was out there, if I would have been
paying attention or anybody else would have been paying
attention, I could have bought the dallascowboys.com domain
name, and if they really wanted it I could have sold it to them
for thousands or even millions of dollars because it's a domain
name that they have used.
And believe it or not that's the way actually a lot of people
started it up, they ended up buying several thousand or
several millions of domain names and they feel like now that they
have all these they can sell them they can dish them out.
So that's an interesting story about domain
names and the Dallas Cowboys.
Eventually they got it resolved, they purchased it back, and they
got their site up and running again, but interesting little
story, share that with your friends.
Alright, and the costs you look at it, it's pretty cheap, you
can spend anywhere from nine to 12 bucks a year.
Actually this one was kind of fun for a while, I was a .org.
I wonder if it's still available out
there, gabegrant.org, yep TA-DA!
9.99, you're going to buy it and try and sell it to me, that's
alright I'll just go buy Justin Overland.org and .com every
combination of your name possible.
No, but the prices they have gone up.
Whenever I purchased this name the last time, I think I paid
seven bucks for it, now it's 10 bucks.
But relatively inexpensive to have that identity, it may be
something that your customer asks for especially because with
those free web hosting accounts, the other thing that you'll find
out, let me actually show you real quick.
Webs.com is where we're at right?
You'll notice that, whenever you go to create your name let's say
it's a group organization and you say "Hey
what's my site address?"
or the domain you can use, you can pop in anything you want but
the extension is going to followed by a .webs.com.
So that's the only downside too if you're really, really
particular about having that identity or having that brand
you may be out of luck especially with these free web
hosting options.
Something that you'll probably need to
talk about with your customer.
The Dallas Cowboys thing still blows my mind too, because like
the whole idea is that whenever you set these up they want your
credit card number that way so whenever they need to re-up it,
they just do it automatically and
you'll never forget about it.
So obviously Jerry Jones forgot to update his credit card or got
a different credit card and whenever they went to go bill
Jerry Jones credit card it wasn't there and that's why it
expired, just funny stuff, funny, funny, funny stuff.
Alright, so let's say that you went ahead, you've got a
customer, you put together this really sick kind of website for
that customer, got it put together in a folder etc. etc.
and you have the remote host info which means you have the
server address, you know the server you have to upload it to.
You have that domain name as well, you've got that figured
out, but that's not going to do you any good unless you know how
to connect to that web server using our understanding of
network connections and file management.
The most popular way to modify these files is called File
Transfer Protocol, or FTP.
That's how we connect to a remote host or a web server from
a local host or computer that we have right in front of us okay.
So the applications that we used last week fugu, or I'm sorry,
fetch that's an FTP.
Fugu is another kind, cyberduck is out there if you're on the
Windows side there's a program called winsep or winftp you can
use those, they're built into it.
I think even the Mac operating system you can connect to FTP
sites out of that as well.
I'll tell you what, I'll go through the FTP process real
quick after I go through and talk about sub-domains because
that'll be a little bit clearer of what I'm
getting at right here.
Alright, what you will find out is that for testing and hosting
purposes one domain may actually be home
to several smaller sites.
These smaller sites are setup as what we call sub-domains, which
is a smaller domain that is a part of a larger domain.
Which is really just like having a website inside of a website.
You'll find out that you can probably host literally hundreds
of different websites inside of your single
domain on your EIU account.
And we see this actually all the time, let's as an example
Yahoo.com they've got their fingers
in just about everything.
They've got a sports site, they've got a, they've also got
their healthy living site, they've got their movies site,
just about anything.
And instead of going out and purchasing domain names for
every single one of those sites and also purchasing the hosting
for every single one of those sites, that could be really
tedious and take a long freaking time and not
to mention a whole lot of money.
Instead what they do is they create all of those sub-websites
or sub-domains and just they drop them inside of the regular
domain as a sub-folder, that's it.
And whenever you go to that sub-folder it will take you
inside of a new website.
And like you did the other day for your bad site right, you
typed in the URL, pin.eiu.edu/~ and then whatever
your EIU user name is right?
And right after that you put a backslash bad site.
Well that backslash bad site just was referring to a
sub-folder inside of your main domain,
so just like a sub-domain.
So in essence whenever you enter yahoo.com/sports it'll take you
to sports.yahoo.com.
Kyle you better not be texting, better
put that phone up on the table.
Very good, you can put a pencil and paper
in your hand if your fingers get bored.
Alright, so as an example you go to yahoo.com it'll take you to
their main site, I don't get the deal with Natalie Portman, I
don't know, I just don't get it.
And whenever we scroll to sports if I were to click on that, it
takes you to a website that says sports.yahoo.com.
You can get to that in the same path just by putting the
backslash sports, because all it's doing is
taking you to a sub-folder.
They've got their server setup to recognize a sub-domain and
it'll still take you to the same place.
Same thing if you wanted to go to shopping, see what they have.
So shopping.yahoo.com, you typed in shopping, which I can't spell
this morning, it'll take you to the same site.
That's how they have it setup.
Now EIU's, your testing space that you have right now is not
setup like that, so they've got it setup a little bit
different but that's all you're really doing.
Whenever I type in bad site, I'm just going into a sub-folder,
because actually my main website we've all been to, it looks like
this for right now.
So it just takes me to a sub-folder if I go up here to
good site, look how the address changes up top here.
It jumps into a sub-folder, that is the only way that they've
been able to put more than one site inside of
a single domain name.
How it looks whenever you connect to it via cyberduck or a
FTP program that you have.
Gosh am I already connected to it?
There we go.
I'll enter my server...and this is the opening start, and then
the folder where everything is stashed is for my main web page,
it's located right here.
This is where it starts to get tricky, you'll remember that I
told you, "Hey, you have to drop that folder whenever you're done
with it inside of that HTTP or WWW folder right?
There's a reason for that because if we end up moving that
outside of it, in this case I'll move it outside of this and I'll
just actually drop it at a level higher, okay so that it is
actually outside of my HTTP folder as you look at it.
And I want to go to find this page if I refresh that they're
not going to be able to find it.
So that's one area that people, like I said before, they'll
screw up a sub-domain or a sub-website, they'll put it in
the wrong location.
You can do this a variety of different ways too, let's say in
this case I got a little bit careless and instead of putting
it in the HTTP folder, I put it in my dwadv folder.
Okay so we look in that folder that I have located right now
and here's bad site and then I open it up so you'll see how the
path changes as well.
The important thing for you to remember is that for a
lot of these sub-domains you'll see that I've got,
where did I drop it?
I dropped it in this folder.
They stay at the same level as the majority of
your other sub-folders.
So I've got one site here which is the bad site for my website.
Then I've got another one for my good site, you'll also see that
I have images as well.
Then I've also got a folder here for managed sites and FTP use
okay, so they're all independent websites that are operating
under my current space and whenever you want to go to these
websites that are operating through that current domain you
just pop in a sub-folder name.
Which just follows your gjgrant or your eforum extension.
So that's all you're doing if you just create these websites,
you'll do the same thing especially for the packet that I
put together for you.
You've got a folder that's called Dreamweaver underscore
and then your last name and you'll just save it right there,
it'll be a sub-folder.
So that's how we're able to host multiple sites inside of your
main website, it's just dropped in there as a sub-folder, it's
the only thing that you have to know about it.
That's effectively all they've done on Yahoo servers as well,
they just have a subfolder with a website called sports and then
that's where all the work takes place.
Alright, one thing that I guess I probably should ask you real
quick is, if I say the words meta tags, meta data, does that
mean anything to anybody at all?
Meta tags, meta data?
Nate what do you know about meta tags or meta data?
[unclear audio].
Okay, wow what is that tattoo on your foot?
[unclear audio].
Oh alright, nice.
Back on the subject, anybody have a flickr account how about
that real quick.
Flickr, okay, and whenever you're on flickr you decide that
you want to look through some pictures and you type in some
keywords, let's say for an example you wanted to look up a
picture of a mountain lake you would type in those keywords and
a list of results pops up for you.
Same thing happens whenever you go to google and you type in
just a list of search words, you say like "awesome shoes" or
something like that, or you're looking for makeup or Bulls
tickets or...
What was that?
Okay, I'll just assume that it was something appropriate.
Or Blackhawk tickets, no that would be
inappropriate, oh there you go.
Yes, yes, what are they doing this year?
What are they doing?
That's right.
But you enter the search terms right?
You enter the search terms in that little Google search bar on
the Yahoo search bar or Bing.
And based on these search terms computer kicks back to you a
variety of different results and it ranks them right?
We see that and we know that usually the first ones are
probably our best bet but as we start to go down the list we may
not find exactly what it is that we're looking for.
But then we've also had those rare instances where after we
thumb through about 15 or 20 pages of those search results,
we find something that's exactly what we're looking for.
All of that works because of meta data or meta tags.
Search engines use these key terms or keywords as you may
also know them or be familiar with them, to be able to decide
how they're going to list your website and also
how to rank your website.
This is information that they actually put up in the top of
the code that doesn't display on the webpage period.
You don't see it on the web page, but it will display
usually with your Google search, it might show
up on a web page like that.
And it will also be the deciding factor on whether or not you're
first page is going to be your option.
Actually what I think we'll do is we'll take a look at some of
these, we can go back and look at our page source, that's a
really good way to kind of decide how
they put the page together.
Let's try this, here we go.
Alright, we're looking at the code for this web page that we
have put together and take a look right up top here, see a
tag that's called meta name, description,
and then we have content.
So it's got a description it says,
"Pay less for domain names.
Register your .com, .net, .org for 9.99 a year.
Bulk pricing and private domain name registration are options."
Blah, blah, blah, and then after that you'll notice keywords,
domain, domain name, domain registration, registrar by
domains, register domain names, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They got about every word on here that's related to the
freaking internet or to hosting services for that matter.
The way that Google and other search engines work is they have
these crawlers and they'll crawl through the web servers that are
out there available and if they can find this information first,
if they can find keywords or they can find descriptions then
they'll use that in turn to go back into their search engine
databases and they will put a ranking
according to your website.
So based on this information if you enter cheap, transfer
domain, inexpensive, you should theoretically
get GoDaddy as an option.
So let's try this, cheap, transfer domain, and inexpensive
let me see if I can enter those search
terms and see what happens.
So cheap, transfer domain, domain and then inexpensive,
let's see what options it gives me.
Now it's probably going to give me a variety of other options,
but what's one of the first ones to pop up there, and this is an
ad but what do we find?
GoDaddy pops up, it's an option that they have right there.
We can try another one real quick.
You know what, just for fun what is the Chicago Blackhawk's web
address, anybody remember?
Is it like Blackhawks.com?
Chicago,...what I didn't want to go here.
Chicago Blackhawks here we go.
Okay we'll go to their official website and, oh
they don't allow you to view their source.
Some places actually, some places will block that you'll
find out, no here we go, it just hasn't come up.
So let's take a look real quick at the description they have the
official site for the Chicago Blackhawks and then for the
keywords that they put in here they also have Blackhawk stats,
Blackhawks roster, Chicago, NHL Blackhawks, Blackhawks fan club,
Chicago NHL.
So if you're able to enter any of those search words into your
Google search, the odds are that this will probably be one of the
websites one of the first websites to pull up
and pop up in front of you.
So that's how they use them.
How do you transfer that information, well you have to be
able to enter it into the head of the document.
Now this requires a little bit of back end work in Dreamweaver
as an example.
Let me go ahead and I'll just show you, it's probably not as
difficult as you may think it is.
I'm going to go ahead and cancel this real quick.
I'm going to create just a blank HTML document,
if we ever get going come on.
There we go split my view up and these usually go
in the head of the document.
The head is information that doesn't display on a page
itself, so in this case I'm going to drop these meta tags or
meta data, not there, actually I'll
probably drop them right here.
I'll drop my cursor, just so we can see where I'm at.
You'll notice this is the start of the head that's the closing
tag of the head tag.
And then I can go up here to insert HTML and then head tags,
so you can enter your keywords very simply like this.
I'm still bitter, how about this?
I won't go any further than that okay but those are some of the
keywords that we can use.
If you want to be able to put together a website that talks
about this particular individual in these sort of details and
want to get a high search rating I'll go ahead and say okay and
it'll automatically generate that code for you.
And you'll notice that whenever I press "refresh" it doesn't
even show up on a page anywhere, but it will be helpful whenever
the crawlers do come around to your website and they kind of
thumb through it to see what you have.
So those are keywords.
Another one that they have down here that's a very helpful one
that we use as well is also the description tag, if I jump back
in here real quick and look at the description it says, "The
official site of the Chicago Blackhawks."
Description tags normally pop up on the Google search page right
here, which is supposed to be right here.
They actually pop up right underneath here, it's usually a
paragraph of information or a couple lines or sentences of
information that displays underneath the main link for the
website that they use.
So it's information that will display in that case, that's
what they'll use as the description tag.
So in this case if you want to pop a description in it's really
easy, you go to your HTML.
Description...
I don't know if that's a word.
Okay, so you'll put in a description, sometimes it'll
have information like, "Welcome to this company," or "This
company does this."
This information sometimes they'll have links that they can
put in there as well that will display with the description.
As soon as you enter it, they'll automatically
join it right there.
Let me see if I can pull up one that I did real quick,
Industrial Engine Service, I did this one a long time ago.
And in the tag I put together rebuilders of diesel, natural
gas engines, full engine machine service in Highland, Indiana
then I put in their website as well.
Then if we go to view the source, hello.
You'll see the description it's popped in here, and everything
that I wrote, right there, shows up and of course I have my
keywords in there as well.
You can also do some other things with meta name, you can
put copyright, you can put authors, you can put emails,
etc. etc. But the main things that you need to make sure you
have in there are the descriptions gives your site a
little bit more validity.
Because just about anybody can throw anything out there but
whenever you start to put this up there and start to read the
Google search engine, they're going to realize, "You know
what, there's something going on here, there's something with
this company that I recognize and I like about them."
So you have your description, you have your keywords, and then
the final item that I see a lot of people forget it and I'm not
sure why it's relatively easy to change.
And that deals with the title of the document right here.
Let me just go ahead and save this page as being blank.
I'll put a little bit of color on here.
Alright, so I'll go ahead and save this to the desktop for
right now just as an example.
And then whenever I go to preview it, look at this right
up top here, where that says "Untitled Document" and by
default a lot of novice web designers, they leave it like
that and I don't think it's necessarily the best
thing for a designer to do.
Really you should try to title your documents, you should try
to put some sort of a name at the top of the page, it's just
one of those finer points that you can do to
give more validity to your website.
Even if it's something as simple as going up here to the title,
this is actually how you change it.
You can change it here, or you can go to the code and change it
right here, those two places.
And you just rename it.
Okay, and I'll do F5, and I'll zoom out of here, there we go.
And whenever I save it and preview it, you notice that the
heading changes.
And I think you see it on just about every
website that you go to.
You go to Yahoo, they've got their Yahoo with the exclamation
point, very simple.
Go to Apple, it'll change as they go to different pages which
is another common thing for people to do.
Like they'll say, the example that I had the industrial engine
service their homepage and then you go to their contact page
it'll say industrial engine service contact us, etc. etc. So
it's one of those nice little finesse things you might think
about changing as you go from page to page, but at least have
it so that it says something other than "Untitled Document."
It'll really, really help everything else
out for your website.
And I think I just talked about these but I'll let you go ahead
and get these formal definitions down for those
meta tags and meta data.
One thing I will also about these meta tags is that whenever
they put this, whenever those crawlers go out there even in
spite of not having this, they will kind of thumb through the
information that you have on your pages but, depending on
what it is it may not be exactly right.
So that's why it's better to put these meta tags in your page,
it'll get your search up and going a whole heck of a lot
quicker.
And notice that the keywords meta tag that are brought up for
GoDaddy was absolutely huge, so give you an idea.
But try to think of relevant information, that's always the
key point whenever you're putting meta tags or
meta data out there.
If you end up advertising for a company that they do
construction work, and you end up putting in there keywords
meta tag information that they have Ford pickup trucks and
Caterpillar cranes or something like that, that may not be fully
relevant to what they do or what people are looking for.
But if you know that they end up doing something like framing of
houses, or they do roofing, or they do reconstruction, or
demolition that's relevant information.
Always, always, always make sure you realize
if that information is relevant.
Try to think about how a person, whenever they sit down at a
computer, will enter these search terms.
One thing that I always do whenever I have to put together
a list of words with a customer is, I'll go around in the
office, or I'll go around where the people are
working at and I'll ask them.
I'm like, "Okay, if you were searching for this, why don't
you go ahead and type it in if you're searching for this, if
you need this done, if you need this done."
And I'll see what they type in and I'll take notes, make a
list, and from the lists that I've compiled I'll figure out
what search terms are most commonly used,
and how they're put together.
Another thing that actually happens, which I thought was
really, really kind of strange.
If you go to B & H Photo Video, anybody
know that website at all?
Okay, if you end up buying digital cameras or any other
equipment, it's a really kind of awesome, awesome place, they've
got everything, literally everything that you can get.
B & H Photo Video, I use them as a resource and actually, maybe
I'll just show you what they did with their
meta tags which blows my mind away.
I'll let you get this down first.
It's something that we normally wouldn't think of but as we put
it together as search term, or search inquiry, it draws a lot
of traffic to their site.
Alright, so B & H, how they display themselves as B & H
Photo Video, I'll just go in here real quick
kind of show it to you.
They've got a lot of great stuff on there, they've got that
ampersand right there in their name and if you're not paying
attention to how you're typing, as I'm looking at the keyboard
right here, the ampersand is actually a number seven so you
have to hold the shift key and put the number seven in.
And based on their research and what they found,
B7H, what the heck is that?
That'll take you exactly to B & H Photo Video.
It was something that they thought about whenever they were
looking at their search terms and search queries, they
realized that if somebody didn't hit the shift key quite right
whenever they put that ampersand in there, they'd get B7H and
they made that one of the top hits that they have.
That's pretty nuts right?
Wow, crazy.
Last thing that you should know, those meta tags, meta data, that
will help pickup your websites.
It'll do some of the work for you.
You'll notice that IAS of Indiana it was one of the top
things that they had there, but not all of those search engines
will go out and pick up those sites right away.
If you get done building a site and you load it up to your
hosting space, got the domain all set and you try to enter
search words or keywords for it, like 10, 15 minutes after you do
it, it may not pop up, it may not register
in a Google search period.
It can take as long as four to six weeks, just based on the
amount of information that's on web servers currently to be able
to evaluate and find all that information.
One thing that I tell people to do and I've done myself is that
you can actually submit the URLs to classify the site and to be
able to increase the traffic.
And whenever you're done with your customer's website you can
go back to this presentation and click on these links.
It's not really that hard to do either, it probably takes right
around five minutes and it speeds up that process from four
to six weeks to right around a week to two weeks.
Which that speaks a lot, if you're out there and you want to
see the immediate affect two, three weeks
that's quite a bit. Yeah Ashley.
[unclear dialogue].
Four to six weeks, okay let's say that you're done with your
website, you have loaded it up, and you go into Google type in
the search term for your website, nothing's showing up,
nothing's there, they're not able to find it.
Their servers, their search engines have crawlers and those
crawlers go out into all the web servers out there in the cloud
and they will search the descriptions and the keywords
but only whenever they get to them, it can take four to six
weeks for that process for it to find your webpage.
You submit your URLs to these three major search engines they
will actually pick it up faster.
I don't think a whole heck of a lot of people know about this or
know how easy it is to be done, but it's
pretty simple to be able to do.
I'll show you how they work here in a second, one thing I will
say though is that when it's all said and done, the meta data and
the submitting URLs are going to be the cheapest way, because
they're absolutely free.
I am a big fan of free, your customers are a big fan of free.
Part of the reason they only took you, is because you said,
"I am not going to charge you to do promotional work."
I'm sorry but that's just the way it is,
people jump all over that stuff.
But, in the end ultimately you may
have to purchase advertising.
So for those really big companies that have those really
big hits, those top hits, they shell out thousands and
thousands of dollars to be able to have their
hit be the number one hit.
Some of it's also by default, I mean when every one of your
major search engines is Yahoo!
and you want to try to put together a company called
yahoo.something else Yahoo!
because they control the search engine, they're just like, "Well
we're just going to make ourselves the top hit for just
about anything that you look for web related."
And the advertising, that can be a lot.
My father-in-law, whenever he had a business, and this has
probably been 10 or 15 years ago, he, and this was just for
advertising, no I think yellow book was just starting to come
out onto the web and this was a place where they told him to
advertise.
They wanted $8000.00 to run an ad not only in the paper but
also on their website, and I can
imagine that it's significantly higher now.
I'll show you what these sites look
like, they're really easy to do.
Ta-Da!
Type in the URL or the web address, put in any
comments put that in, click add URL.
That's it.
That's all you have to do for Google, lets see how
much harder Yahoo! is.
Submit a website or webpage, they just say "submit the URL."
There's got to be some sort of a trick for this, go to bing,
nada, just enter some characters, enter the homepage,
they'll pick it up within one to two weeks, you know
make it go a little bit faster.
Got this down?
Okay, good.
This is going to be relative to you, especially when you end up
creating your customer's final site here in a couple weeks.
Are there any questions about the content that we covered
today for the presentation?
No?
Nada?
Man, where is everybody?
People just did not want to show up today.
I did read in the Daily Eastern Newsletter there's like a pink
eye outbreak or something like that.
What's that?
Swine flu.
Okay, you'll have to do some computer work,
the swabs are there.
Let me show you where to get the packet
and how I distribute stuff.
Alright, the packet I put together for you in WebCT I hope
is pretty straightforward, I mean I've eliminated a lot of
the extraneous stuff that people have told me to eliminate in the
past and I've condensed it only to a week by week format.
So all you have to cover or work with this week is all I have
displayed right now, so if you go to your student view, go to
the course content you'll see that there is a document called
"Dreamweaver Section 1."
It's going to walk you through some of the things, now you
won't need any resource files actually to do this, all you'll
need is a computer, Dreamweaver, and your flash drive, that's it.
The resource files you will need next week to
be able to work on this.
But all it's doing is it's taking you through step-by-step
on how to create a webpage as the structure is typically used
for a lot of the more modern websites, the way a lot of the
modern websites are done is using a coding of div tags like
we worked with last week.
Tables just aren't the thing anymore.
Div tags are more powerful ways.
So it'll take you through it's got some screenshots telling you
exactly what you need to code into the proper locations.
It goes step-by-step with the instructions.
As soon as you get, what we call, your main page put
together, your index page, because the way that you should
build pages properly is that you build your index page first and
that's going to serve as your template for
the rest of your website.
As soon as you have your index page put together your CSS page
put together then you can make the rest of your pages.
Okay, it's very very simple.
You'll have the opportunity to implement some meta tags, and
for this example you're going to be a college student who's
developing an e-portfolio who wishes to get
a job upon graduation.
That's pretty relevant right, to just about everybody in this
room, unless you don't want to leave college, you're scared of
the real world.
That's why I'm here.
We will set up the site to use what we call div tag or a cms,
content management system.
If you haven't worked with one of these before, I've got a free
resource that you'll learn how to use next week, but we'll set
up the page and the code to be able to do that.
There's a checkpoint, whenever you've done that, that you'll
need to ask me, have me look at it, see if
there's any problems or corrections.
Hopefully you shouldn't have too many problems to be able to go
through this, after that you'll create the rest of your pages
and then you will upload it to the web server.
Whenever you're finished, you'll submit me the URL via WebCT
which will really just be the same address you sent me last
week, except the extension in this case instead of bad site,
will actually be the folder that you create.
Dreamweaver, that's a typo I'll fix that,
it's just Dreamweaver and your last name.
I caught a typo on the last page, I can't believe that.
This will need to be done by the end of the class on Friday.
You will have the remainder of time to be able
to work on it today.
We do have open lab hours from one to four on Tuesday Thursday.
What else am I trying to think?
I think the graduate assistant, Molly, has also agreed that on
four to six on Monday Wednesday she's going to open up the lab,
so if you want to come in here and work from four to six.
So now we have lab hours on those two days to be able to
work and you'll have all the class time on Wednesday and all
of class time on Friday to be able to complete this.
I don't think that there are any issues other than the one typo
that I had here, if you do come across
something please feel free to ask me.
And then of course you can go do this work at the Gregg
Technology Center as well.
The only tools like I said you need this packet, flash drive,
and computer with Dreamweaver.
Now you may, as you're working through this packet you may
notice that some things don't look as crisp or
clear as they probably should.
Believe me, by the time you're done with it what it should look
like, you'll notice it, you'll recognize it.
It should be very basic it'll look primitive but it will
function properly as it should.
Are there any questions about what you're going
to be working on this week?
Next week we're going to expand on this, if you don't have this
completed by Friday you're already going to be behind
because we're going to use the same website to expand it, add
material, add media to it.
That's why it's essential that you get
this done by this Friday.
Anything else?
We good?
Okay, got anymore problems let me know.
The computers are over there if you choose to work.