You are going to need a way to get your works of art onto your web site. Unless you own a huge scanner, the best way is to purchase a digital camera.
It doesn’t have to be an expensive, million-super-mega pixel, super-mega-expensive model, just a basic cheap model as images displayed on your website need a resolution of 72 pixels per inch (ppi) only, anything more is just wasted. While 72ppi looks pretty poor if printed onto photo paper, for web sites it looks fine. The digital camera I used to take all the images on the Echostains site cost 50 pounds ($30) and I reckon that a camera half that price would be just as good.
If a digital camera is out of the question and you own a scanner you can just take some normal film photographs of your work and scan them onto your PC. Drop the resolution of your scanner down to 72ppi -- most scanners have the default set around 150 – 200.
Once you have the images of your art on your computer, you need to make two copies of each, one a small thumbnail image about 120x90 pixels and another larger image around 600x400 pixels. (Pixels is a unit of measurement, think of it as the computer version of millimetres or inches.) There are lots of free software programs (called freeware programs) available that will make thumbnails out of your images and arrange them into a gallery as well. You just state how many images you want in the gallery and what colour you want the background to be and the programmes does the rest. What you end up with is a ready-made web page that you can preview in your browser.
How Long Will It Take To Design My Web Site?
Providing you’ve got everything organized in advance -- your sketches of your web site design, all your images on your computer and all the software you require -- you can have a basic rough version of your web site running on your computer in less than a day.
When it comes to putting your site onto the internet, you don’t want a rough site where links lead nowhere, so make sure you test everything in your own browser. When you click the ‘My Gallery’ link does it open your gallery page? When you click on a thumbnail image, does it open the larger version of that image -- or a different image? Most web-building software have link checkers that will tell you what links don’t work, but you can’t beat checking yourself in your own browser; you know what you want your pages to do, the software will do only as you tell it.
Sure it can be tedious to check and recheck everything on your site, but I’m sure you know from your own experience how frustrating it can be when things on a website don’t work as they should and how it reduces the chances that you’ll visit the site again. So, with a bit of patience, you should have your site running smoothly on your computer in about a week -- and you still have 23 days left on the trial software to try out some of your other ideas.
How Do I Get My Web Site Online?
The web site you always dreamed of having is about to happen. So far it should have cost you next to nothing, so let’s try and keep it that way. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs or the company you use for your internet connection) allow subscribers free web space. Check with yours to see if they offer this service. Even a small amount of web space should be enough to hold your site.
When we first started looking into web site hosting companies -- and there are hundreds to choose from -- we went for a package allowing us 500mb of space hoping this would be enough. Little did we know that the current version of our site uses just 12mb, so we could have gone for a much smaller package. Even so, the package we bought was not all that expensive, costing us about five pounds ($3) a month.
Also consider registering a name for your site, for example a web address such as www.echostains.com looks and sounds better than the address offered from your ISP which will also include their name and the folder they store the sites in! To register a name cost just a few dollars a year, but you need a name no-one else has thought of first. If you pick a name like ‘myart.com’ the chances are it’s already being used by someone and will not be available. So go for something snappy or use your full name, you will then have exclusive rights to that name and can even arrange an email address with the same name. Just think paintings@<your sites name>.com.
When you set up your web space, you will be given a user name and a password which you will need to upload the web site files from your computer to your web space. This process is known as FTP (file transfer protocol). Most web-design software includes FTP, but once again there are loads on the market some on limited trials and others totally free.
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