Table of Contents:

Why build a website?
Getting Started
Web Hosting
Page Construction
Uploading Your Website
Content

Why build a website?

The Internet has become the main way that people research topics and keep track of what is going on in the world. This also includes finding out what's going on in Fandom, learning about things Klingon, Star Trek fan community, and the SF fandom in general. Most conventions, probably all of them these days, have a website. Many fan groups, KAG or otherwise, also have websites.

Websites are a way of extending the fan community from local to global, and provide a means of communicating ideas as well as news that is of interest to fans.

Getting Started

Learning to develop websites using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets is really not that difficult. As a little background on what I have done, I put together my first website in 1995 as Sqo'tty MacKlingon's Engineering Room, which became the de facto website for the IKV Midnight Dagger and eventually first website for the Ring of Fire Fleet (this is prior to the ROF split from KAG). The site has undergone some evolution and hosting sites over the years, switching from pure HTML to supplementing with Server-Side Includes and then into Content Management Systems when I took on setting up a website for the Cold Death Quadrant of the Cold Terror Fleet.

It's nice to have a good looking site, but it is content that will keep people coming back to it, and wanting to get join with your ship.

The first step for a group is to find a willing GFP (that stands for Glutton for Punishment) or volunteer who will act as the group's webmaster. That person will take on the mantle of responsibility of getting the site designed and up and running. To ease the pain of getting started with a design, the E-Commander has provided a template that can be used to help get things rolling. This site was developed using the template as part of the entire revamp project.

Web Hosting

It is important to find a web host that will fill your needs. When getting started, especially when funds are limited, consider using a free web host or check to see if your ISP package includes a website package (many do) as part of the basic service.

This should provide you with a starting point for your website.

The price of disk space has plummeted greatly resulting in many web hosting providers allocating larger amounts of disk, which is handy if you plan to post a lot of images.

If you go that route, check out findmyhosting.com to shop and compare web hosting providers, and consider registering a domain for your ship to make it easier to find.

Webpage Construction

There have been a number of tools developed to help people create their own web pages, including tools like FrontPage. As I've never used any of them, I can't recommend any to you.

HTML is not hard to learn. All it takes is some time, effort, and some good reference material. The place to start is with a good book on HTML that includes coverage of basic Cascading Style Sheets. If you can, thumb through a few books and find one that fits your needs. I tend to like books published by O'Reilly and their "Definitive Guide" and "Cookbook" series. One note: make sure the publication date is fairly current in order to get the most current information on language standards.

You will need a text editor. Notepad will do the job, however there are better tools out there that you can use to get the job done. My favorite is WinEdit, but is a bit pricey for the license. TextPad is also good, and not as pricey. I've just started working with a free text editor called KomodoEdit. It's from ActiveState and looks to be very good and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It could very easily supercede WinEdit as a favorite text editor.

There are some basic tags that you will learn in your journey to developing a great website. We're going to discuss some of them here.

A website, in its simplest form, is comprised of one or more HTML files. A style sheet is a series of elements that are used to define a look and feel to the website by extending the properties of the HTML tags you use. These styles can either be incorporated directly into the HTML file, or contained in a separate CSS file that is "included" into each HTML file. I prefer using the second option of keeping the style sheet in a separate file and then referencing it in the HTML files through the "include" directive. The E-Corps website was developed using this technique.

Some of the HTML formatting tags, such as the center,left, right tags have been depricated and replaced by the div tag with cascading styule sheet implementation of the text-align attribute. Many font related tags have also been deprecated in favor of cascading style sheets.

For example, if you place the following into your style sheet:

div.right { text-align: right; }
div.center { text-align: center; }
div.left { text-align: left; }
h1 {font-family: Arial; color: red }

then reference in the HTML as

<div class="center"><h1>My Content</h1></div>
you should get:

My Content

Uploading Your Web Site

Once you have created a web page, it is time to upload it to your hosting provider. If you don't already have it, download and install an FTP client.

Your hosting provider may require you to use their own upload utility, and some of these only allow you to upload one file at time. Most will allow you to use your own FTP client, such as WinFTP, WinSCP, WS-FTP or FileZilla. My recommendation is to use FileZilla.

Content

It's nice to have a good looking site, but it is content that will keep people coming back to it, and wanting to get join with your ship

At the minimum, the site should contain the name of your ship, local, quadrant and fleet, if known (and links back to same), how to contact the crew (important for recruiting new members) and mention (and link) to the KAG website.

Beyond that, here are some additional ideas:

The front page (index.html) should contain background on your ship and KAG in general. It should also contain a site index to aid visitors exploring the rest of the pages of your site.

If you have a ship's logo, display it at the top of the page.

It is also a good idea to have a page that serves as the ship's "Who's who" with pictures of the crew in their best outfits and some of their interests.

You could also include a section where you can post write-ups and photos from your various exploits, whether it is a convention or other activities, like the bowling tournament with the local Feddie ship. This will help people get an idea of what kind of things the group likes to do and get them interested in signing on. It can also double as a ship's newsletter.

A calendar of upcoming events, such as conventions the crew will be at, challenges or other events that new comers would be welcome to is also appropriate.

Include a page of links to websites that would be of interest, and these should include links to the main KAG website as well as to your fleet and quadrant websites. Linking to the quartermaster's website is also a good idea to help your crew (both new and old) in getting suited up for their next outing.

Most importantly, have fun with it and encourage the entire crew to participate in developing content for the site.