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Hit Counters There are several ways to maintain a page hit count. Some CMSs have this functionality built into it, like mediawiki and php-Nuke. Static HTML sites, such as the focus of our discussion on the E-Corps site, can accomplish this through several means. One is setting up an account on site meter and adding the code they provide to your website. The basic user account is Free! It will display an icon (you can select the one to use from a fairly wide variety) and the number of times the page has been loaded. This is handy as it can be tuned to filter out hits from your own computer, thus eliminating inflating the total number of hits on your website. It also provides you with a number of statistical reports, including data on refering websites, entry/exit page, number of pages viewed, IP address of the requestor, and so on. A great bargain for the price you pay. Did I mention that it is free? Another method is to use CGI scripts incorporated into your website to track and record hits. There are a number of such counters available on the web; you should have some basic programming knowledge before implementing these website counters. One more option is to use a coding directive as follows: Simple, easy to set up, and plain. I prefer to use the built in stats counter provided by CMSs, and site meter otherwise. Kordite found a fine utility called escrambler, which generates that little mailto tag based on a scrambled code. I am adopting that same utility for use on the E-corps site. Some CMSs provide a contact form that can be filled out by site visitors and emailed directly to an account that you specify. This is a handy extension and protects your email address. There are also CGI scripts that can perform the same function, however it is important to use one that provides appropriate server security as there are ways to over-ride the input field and gain access to OS levels of the server. If your web hosting service provides a CGI script, use that instead of one downloaded from the net. Web hosting providers have a certain level of self-preservation and will take the precuations to write a script that prevents these types of security risks. My current hosting provider provides such a script and I am using it for the Cold Death Quadrant website. Another possibility that is commonly used is to list the email address but not include the mailto tag. The way to do this is to break up the email address, using the ASCII codes for special characters (for the "@" sign use @ and every period to .). Putting spaces between each charcter is an additional layer of protection example: to display the my email address, I would list it as "s q o t t y @ y a h o o . c o m Another alternative would be more simply done by substituing the words for the symbols like this: sqotty*AT*yahoo*DOT*com. Don't use flashing text. It draws attention away from the rest of your content and many people find it annoying. Do not use music, audio or video clips that autoplay when the page loads. It soaks up bandwidth and not everyone will want to see/hear it every time they visit your site. Although most browsers can handle frames, it is best to avoid them. Use tables instead. Avoid using Flash and Java as many people configure thier browsers to not run these applets. Current versions of Flash are not available on some platforms, especially Linux. Use multiple pages instead of one big page. Keep your content relevant to each page. Avoid being commercial. Having a couple of souveniors to sell through your site is one thing, however selling stuff should not be the focus of a KAG website. Don't post lots of large image files. If you plan on posting lots of pictures, use thumbnails of the images and anchor the full sized image to the HTML doc. Lots of images, even small ones, dramatically increase the amount of time to download a page. Be kind to folks who don't have broadband and are stuck with dialup service. At 56kbs it takes 1 second per KiloByte to download a file. example: Building Webpages for Everyone Everyone's computer is set up a little differently based on their own preferences. You will want to design your webpage so that it will look good no matter who's looking at it. That's one of the best tips to keep in mind. To expand on Kordite's last point, I live in an area where most broadband solutions that are available to city folk are not available and dialup service peaks out at 18kbs regardless of the modem. Keep that in mind and be nice to folks with poor bandwidth. Also keep in mind that not all web browsers display the same page exactly the same way. If you can, view your content using both Internet Explorer and a Mozilla based browser such as Firefox. If you are a hard-core techie like me, you can test it out on both Windows based browsers as well as several Linux browsers. It is also important to use the "alt" attribute when using the img tag. This displays a textual message on text only browsers such as Lynx (I acutally know people who STILL refuse to use anything else). The first thing to do is to get other sites to link to you so that search engines such as Yahoo! and Google can find you. Yahoo! has a convenient website submission form you can use to get your site included in their directory. Volumes have been written about how to improve search engine results. Once upon a time it was as simple as having lots of other sites link to you. However both Yahoo! and Google have taken great pains to make it more challenging to get good rankings. One thing you can do is use good keywords in the Meta tags of your web pages. Meta tags are used to provide search engines with relavent information that is then used to better categorize and index your website. The two most important META tags are the "description," which is used to describe the content on the page, and "keywords," which is a list of words pertinent to the site and page. An example would be:
<META name="description" content="KAG E-Corps hints and tips for website development."> Always provide recipricol links to KAG sites that link to you...it helps to notify the webmaster of a site that you have linked to them so that they can provide a link back. That's good netiquette and helps both sites get exposure. A webring is a specialized type of link farm where all members share a common navigation bar. Currently there are two versions of webrings: Webring and Ringsurf. Both are very similar in function. How they work is that a website displaying the navigation bar is linked in different ways to other sites on the web. In 2006, the Webring announced changes in their operations, breaking their memberships into two groups: paid accounts and free accounts. The free accounts are version 1.0 while the paid accounts are version 2.0. Both continue to be available with the caveat that Webring 1.0 ringmasters cannot add more than 50 websites to their webrings. Webring 2.0, due to the nature of being a paid subscription, does not have this limitation. Ringsurf, although smaller and less known, continues to provide free webring services. Both Webring and Ringsurf are viable ways to organize a web community. Known Webrings of interest to KAG and Klingons in general include:
Ideally you should keep the number of webrings that your site is affiliated to a minimum. Two many webrings will clutter your website and devalue your efforts. If you have more than one webring on your website, use the smallest webring navigation box possible for all webrings. You should also make sure that the different navigation bars are the same dimensions to keep a clean and professional look to your site. |