Although Dreamweaver is a wonderful tool for creating Web sites, it can't handle everything you need to put a site online. For example, you can't register a domain name using Dreamweaver, and when you're ready to publish your site, you'll need a Web server. I added this chapter to offer you a handy list of resources that can help you finish your site when you need to go beyond the features in Dreamweaver.
The address for your Web site is its domain name. The domain name is what visitors need to know to find your Web site. For example, you can visit my Digital Family Web site at DigitalFamily.com.
Even before you start building your Web site, I recommend that you register your own domain name. The process is simple, painless, and costs less than $10 per year, but it can take from a few hours to a few days for the domain registration process to be completed.
You can register any domain name that hasn't already been taken by someone else, and for free you can check to see whether a domain name is already taken. Just visit any domain registrar, such as www.godaddy.com or 1and1.com, and enter the domain name you want into the search field on the main page of the registrar's site. If the name you want is no longer available, most registration services will give you a list of recommended alternatives.
Most domain registration services also provide Web hosting services, but you don't have to host your site at the same place where you register the name. You can set up a Web server anywhere you want and then use the domain management settings at your domain registration services to point your name to the server where your Web site is hosted.
Tip
When you enter a domain name into a Web browser, everything before the extension (the .com, .net, or .org part) can be written in uppercase or lowercase, and it will work just fine. However, if you want to go to a specific page within a Web site, such as www.DigitalFamily.com/videos, the text that comes after the extension is often case sensitive. Because the part before the .com doesn't matter, I find it easier to recognize domain names when they're written with capital letters. So, for example, I use www.DigitalFamily.com on my business cards instead of www.digitalfamily.com.
Spammers gather millions of e-mail addresses from Web sites every day by collecting e-mail addresses from links on Web pages. It's common practice for Web designers to include an e-mail link to make it easy for visitors to contact them. Unfortunately, those simple e-mail links make it even easier for spammers to gather e-mail addresses automatically.
To help counter this problem, the programmers at AddressMunger.com have come up with a special way of "hiding" e-mail addresses from the automated bots that spammers use. When you add this special code to your Web pages and use AddressMunger to create the e-mail links on your Web pages, your visitors can still e-mail you easily, but spammer's can't read your e-mail address. It's an easy way to cut down on all that spam in your inbox.
This innovative online service creates a small pop-up preview of any page you link to on your site, like you see in Figure 16-1. You simply sign up (for free) at Snap.com and use their online tool to generate special code you can copy and paste into the code in your Web pages.
With Snap.com's unique pop-ups, anytime your visitors roll their cursors over a link, a small pop-up window appears with a preview that displays the page or site that you've linked to from your site. It's a great way to give visitors a little more information as they peruse your pages and to highlight the links on your site.
You can sell things online in many ways. As a general rule, I recommend that you start simple and add more complex and expensive options after you know that you'll make money with your site.
At the simple end of the spectrum, you can add a purchase button with the services offered at www.PayPal.com or checkout.google.com. Moving up in complexity and price, you can create a shopping system at smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce. If you want a more custom solution and the ability to create your own shopping cart, check out the powerful, highly customizable Dreamweaver-compatible programs at www.WebAssist.com or www.cartweaver.com.
Most Web hosting services provide basic log reports and traffic information, but if you want to know for sure how people are finding your Web site and what they're doing after they get there, consider using a service like Google Analytics, StatCounter.com or WebSTAT.com.
To use any of these services, set up an account and copy a bit of code from the site into your Web pages. (It's a simple copy-and-paste procedure you can do with code view in Dreamweaver.) StatCounter and WebSTAT then use that bit of code to track your traffic.
Tip
Visit any of the three services I mention in this section for a demo and a sample report with all the different kinds of information you can collect, including what search terms someone used to find your site through a search engine. Studying how people use your Web site is one of the best ways to determine how you should continue to develop your content and your design.
Want to know what your visitors really think? Ask them. You can create a free, online survey at SurveyMonkey.com and link to it from your Web site. SurveyMonkey makes it easy to create the survey using a Web browser and then automatically tallies the results and presents them in a series of reports and pie charts. It's a great way to impress your board of directors at the next annual meeting.
If you want more predesigned templates than the ones included in Dreamweaver, use one of the many third-party companies that create and (usually) sell their templates over the Web.
Visit www.dreamweaver-templates.org for a long list of sites that offer templates for free or for a fee. Just download and open them in Dreamweaver, and you can start building your Web site around these professionally created templates in no time.
If you want to keep up with the latest developments in Web design and make sure you're following standards, there is no better place than W3.org, the official Web site of the organization that sets Web standards. You'll find loads of information on this nonprofit site, including the full specification for HTML, CSS, and much more. You can also test your Web pages by entering the URL into the CSS validator at jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator, or the MarkUp validator at validator.w3.org.
Visit the Dreamweaver Exchange Site at www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/ to find a vast collection of extensions you can use to add behaviors and other features to Dreamweaver. It's easy to install them using the Extensions Manager, which I cover in Chapter 10.
While you're at the site, check out Adobe's growing collection of tutorials, updates, and resources, including the new CSS section, where you'll find the latest in CSS tips, tricks, and workarounds at www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver.
Have you ever wondered how some sites add a custom graphic to the address bar at the top of browsers like Internet Explorer? Google adds a capital G, Adobe adds its logo, and you can add an image, too. But first you have to get the image in the right format.
To convert an image into a Favicon, visit Favicon.com, where you can upload a graphic and have it converted for free. Then just add that image to the root level of your main site folder, and it automatically displays in the address bar of a browser.