The Finer points of Publishing your web pages

This information is for ZiaNet customers who have a user directory or user folder on our web site. All user directories are located at http://www.zianet.com/username where username corresponds to the name of your ZiaNet account.

General  §  Images  §  Promotion  §  Courtesy  §  Basic HTML

General information

Do not use spaces in file names for your pages or images. Many web browsers do not handle file names with spaces in them. Use the dash (-) or underscore ( _ ) characters to represent spaces if you wish.

It is best practice to name all of your files in lowercase letters. Some servers force all filenames to lowercase, while others will honor mixed case filenames. If you follow this best practice, your documets will be portable to other servers.

ZiaNet provides a form handling script and an image based counter script for your use. Please note that these services will only work on pages that are published to our server. They will fail if called from another server.

ZiaNet's User server is a Windows 2000 server running IIS v4. At present this server supports ASP, PERL, and Access Database (Jet or ODBC). If you wish to use PERL or Access services you must arrange this with the server administrator. Email cgi@zianet.com. We do not support .NET specific APIs at this time, however you may be surprized that much so-called .ASP functionality is standard ASP (VBScript).

ZiaNet's User server does not support Frontpage Server Extensions. You may use the FTP method to publish your pages to the server.

You may store up to 30M of content on our servers. See our Service agreement for more specific information.

ZiaNet cannot and does not assume responsibility or knowledge of what you pubish on our servers. Unless you ask us for help, or a violation of the law is reported, we will not pay any mind to what you publish. See our Service agreement for more specific information.

Images

Only JPG, GIF, and possibley PNG images should be used in your web page.

• JPG offers the best compression, but may also be lossy (distorted) in some cases. JPG displays better quality with images that have quite a lot of variation, poorly with large areas of solid color. A clear blue sky does not compress very well. You can see grainyness and color distortion. A picture of a dog on the grass will display with very pleasing results. Most image editors allow you to vary the amount of compression to get the best quality. JPG saves your images with millions of colors.
• GIF also compresses the image, but not nearly as much. GIF also offers only 256 colors. However, GIF images are crisp and clean, and GIF allows you to save an image with a Transparent background. It is also possible to do animated GIF images.
• PNG is a recent innovation that combines some of the best features of JPG and GIF. Support for this format is growing, but many older browsers do not display PNG images.

Promotion

If you want the general public to find your web page, there are three essential things that you need to do.

1. Your web page(s) must address a topic that will be of interest to someone out there.
2. You should use Keyword information so that search engines can index your page in a useful manner.
3. You should register your web page(s) with the leading search engines.

Metatags and Keywords

Metatags are special containers in the HEAD section of a web page. While they are not visible to the vistor, they do provide information for search engines. Well crafted Metatag Keyword lists can make it easier for people to find your web site.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="New Mexico,dragons,library,fortune,D&D,DnD,card">

In the example above, the Meta tag is named keywords, which tells the search engine that this is the keyword list for use in indexing the page. The CONTENT contains a list of words to be used. The words may be seperated by spaces or commas. Please note that it is not neccessary to repeat any word in the list. Duplicate words are discarded e.g. "Latin America,North America,Central Amercia" will index as "Latin, North, Central, America" in the search engine. The search result will have the same weight, regardless of how you submitted the keyword list."

Registering with Search Engines

Do not pay anyone to register or promote your work. You will probably be disappointed with the results (we hear this all the time from our customers). Registering your site in the search engines, and seeing the results, is a very imprtant part of the process of web publishing. It is also free.

ZiaNet maintains a list of links to the registration pages of popular search engines.

Courtesy

The Internet is an open network based on trust relationships and courtesy. There are many things challenging this trust right now, and you should do your best to foster courtious behaviour.

• Do not "borrow" images from other web pages without the permission of the author. Authors will nearly always provide an email address where you may ask permission. Provide alink to your page, so that the person may see where a visitor is coming from.
• It is good practice to ask permission to link to someone elses web page or web site. In the case of large commercial enterprises this is not neccessary (for "Sites I Like" type listings), however, when linking to small, personal sites, it is good practice to ask permission. Provide alink to your page, so that the person may see where a visitor is coming from.
• The best way to learn the tricks of crafting web pages is to learn from the web pages of other people. It is possible to view the source code of another page. It is also possible to save a local copy of a page, or of an entire web site, and use the sources for your own work. You should not, however, steal someone else's work and credit it as your own. If you wish to use features or layout from another web page, such that your page would resemble the work of another person, you should ask thier permission before doing so.