First steps in Webmastering..

Don't you feel the necessity of having your own website or blog ? The number of websites is blowing up, and it's time to give up being passive.. It's high time to be productive and contribute with a webpage. Your website will allow you to communicate with others, may be to promote your business or just to have a space to express yourself and to have people to read what you think..

The purpose is noble but you have to choose the best means to make this work done. Because once you start developing your web pages and your visitor counter doesn't move you may feel disappointed and that would discourage you to continue and the whole thing will fail. I keep on saying it everytime : " the biggest webmaster challenge is traffic". There are many things that could keep visitors away from your website , the worst reason is to have a bad web page coding !! You may say " What's with these codes, I'll just use a webpage editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage and I'll have my work nicely done, I don't understand these codes anyway..Learning them will be a waste of time !" and there are several reasons to prouve you're wrong!

First,Your webpage is a group of codes destined to be read by your browser to convert them to text, pictures and so on.. And the biggest source of visitors is search engines which have spiders that crawl into your pages to get informations about your site and save them in the search engine directory but once you have a crowded page with heavy codes the spider will have big problems with indexing you website and that is bad for your website reputation in search engines. Just for the notice : Webpage editors are the worst code makers!

Second, bad coding will cause bowser compatibility problems. There are various browsers (I.E, firefox, Opera, Safari ..etc) and they don't convert codes the same way. So you'd better have a code that suits everybody. There are some rules to follow so you can code properly (W3C normes). Frontpage for example doesn't follow these rules. Actually it was created by microsoft to have websites that suits only Internet Explorer (Microsoft's browser) just to beat Netscape navigator its biggest rival at the time ( Take a look at "The browser wars").

Third, heavy codes will slow the connection to your page, the visitors won't spend time with you to get it opened. And you'll have maby problems with modifications and website promotion.. What if you pasted a javascript for a visitor counter and the page was spammed with popups and ads what will you do ? And how could you recognize the code you pasted in your crowded page !! What if you wanted to paste ads and to blend them with you page layout and give them the best location you want. Do you think that you will have the flexibility to manage you website with these editors? The answer is NO !

In conclusion, if you want to be a successful webmaster you have to learn xHTML/CSS coding. It's not that hard. It will be fun if you follow these lessons. They written in a very creative and detailed way. The site is called "Newbies paradise". I promess, you'll never feel bored!