Web Publishing

Introduction

Web Publishing is the process of creating something that can be electronically transferred, and viewed on a conventional WWW browser. There are numerous possibilities, which can be handled in a number of formats.

And, of course, here are the all-important prices.

Possibilities

There is a certain time expenditure in marking up something into valid HTML, and you have to rent space on an ISP. However once this is done, your information is available globally to anybody that has access to the internet. If you support an interesting and informational site, and encourage your customers to make use of it - it can work out more cost effective than sending out mailshots. Email also is useful for getting messages around without the expense and delay of regular mail services. When I email a friend at a television company, a reciept acknowledgment returns in about forty five seconds. He has not read my message, but I know it is there waiting for him.

I don't think that there is much need to explain the possibilities. This is an HTML resource, and I'm sure you've seen others. However...

Econet Enthusiasts Area.
This is a resource for users and fans of an old and slow networking system designed by Acorn back in the early 80's. It has many links to different hardware items and has been designed to be mostly viewable on all browsers supporting at least HTML 2.0. Tables are used, but it has been designed to fall back to a singular list format.

www.heyrick.co.uk
My entire site has been designed with the philosphy mentioned above. It is targetted at the HTML 3.2 specification and includes images and tables. However by and large it will fall back gracefully on older less capable browsers. Those pages that were deemed too complex to fall back have been given simpler alternatives which are just a mouse-click away.
The entire site has been written from scratch by hand in a text editor. I do not use site creation tools such as MicroSoft FrontPage because they are known to generate "broken" and/or "bloated" HTML, though the situation is better now than it has been in the past. I believe, however, that there are advantages to understanding how a site is built which can help deliver a level of service that just isn't available with site creation tools. I'm sure you've seen sites which better explain this point.
"Shockwave" is not used, because it is a proprietory standard, and not only defeats the open ideals of the 'net, but is also not viewable on the simpler browsers. For example, look at Channel 5's site at www.channel5.co.uk. It is slick, well organised, and looks good.....if you have Shockwave. If you do not, you see nothing useful.

www.radiotimes.beeb.com
This is an example of how not to do it (correct as of January 1999).
This site will, not doubt, look exceptional on MicroSoft Internet Explorer or NetScape Navigator. However it relies heavily on JavaScript and frames and thus fails on many older or less capable browsers.
In fact, in many places the HTML is severely broken. For example; disable your JavaScript and visit the site. It will inform you that your browser does not support frames regardless of whether or not it actually does - because the frames HTML is wrappered in JavaScript!

Formats

It is recommended that coding is done to the official HTML 3.2 DTD, known as "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN" (refer to http://www.w3.org/ for further information).
This offers most of the commonly used entities such as:

Six types of heading.
Meta tags.
Unordered (like this) or ordered listings, dir listings, and menu lists.
Preformatted text areas.
ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8879-1986) character set.
Text styles: TeleType, italic, bold, underline, ~~strike-thru~~, big, small, _subscript, ^superscript, emphasised, strong, definition, code, sample, keyboard, variable, and cite.
Variable font sizes and colours.
Hyperlinks, images, applets, image maps.
Forms, with text areas.
16 million colours, accessable by number (recommended that you keep to the 216 colour safe palette), and 16 colours available by name (aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow).
Forced line breaks
and paragraph breaks.
Control of page background and link colours; with ability to specify a background image which will be tiled as a texture.
Control of text positioning

you can centre things

or right align them

The more advanced browsers will also allow justification - where the text is aligned evenly on both the left and the right; although this is not part of the official HTML 3.2 specification.
Client side image maps.
and much more... refer to the DTD or a book on HTML for full details.

If required, JavaScript can be coded. It is recommended that JavaScript is used only to add functionality to the site; not to replace elements such as the <a href> hyperlinks.

Framed sites can also be created.

If necessary, logos can be drawn, and images can be scanned/digitised. However it is preferred that images and text are pre-supplied. I will make suggestions on ways that images can be modified. Typically your viewers would prefer the image(s) on a single page to be less than 50K in size, or alternatively a simple (approx. 15K) thumbnail as a link to the larger image.

Please keep in mind that HTML means HyperText Mark-up Language. This means that you can specify "this bit in italics" and "this bit should be in a bigger text style". However you cannot specify exactly how a document will look as no two browsers will render it identically. Additionally, the end user adds variables. They can choose not to download the images; or they can be using a 640 x 480 screen resolution instead of 800 x 600.

This is the rough sketch created for the Heyrick area index:

Before I give you any of the HTML that I have written, it is all is checked to ensure the links are valid, the images are sized and the HTML is correct to the official HTML 3.2 dtd.

Whilst I will provide you with suggestions or comments or even books on the subject, the final decisions always belong to you.

Prices

The standard rate for HTML creation is £10 per hour, or part hour. This price includes all marking up, link testing, validation, and ftp uploading to your chosen server. However telephone connections will be itemised and invoiced seperately.
You can choose whether your site is to be uploaded during daytime hours (5p/min) or evenings (2p/min).

If this does not suit you, we can offer you a full site hosting package for the above creation rates, plus £15 per month. You do not pay telephone charges with this service.
Your site URL will be http://www.heyrick.co.uk/your_site_name/
We will create your site and upload it to the HeyRick server, and perform any modifications and/or changes as necessary at the above rates.
We can offer you:

HTML creation, as detailed above.
JavaScript
Server Side Includes

For examples, refer to the main site index. The millennium countdown is written in JavaScript, and the last modified time and current time are SSIs.
Additionally, if you refer to the main index using its old URL (http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/rmurray/index.html), then it will ask you to go to the new URL. The actual index page is identical, but it uses SSI to check if you are calling it 'the old way'.
Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Important:
If you should, at a later date, decide to move your website to a different server or if you wish to take over maintaining the website yourself... please be aware that we will not hit you with a heavy penalty. Your transfer charges are simply £10 plus the cost of the media that the website is supplied on.
Your website can be supplied to you on floppy disc (ADFS or DOS format), iomega 100Mb zip disc (Castle ADFS, Argo ADFS, or DOS format), or ftp uploaded directly to your new server.
If you would prefer, the site can be uploaded onto your new server, and we can continue maintaining it.

The choice is yours, and the prices quoted are the prices you pay. The only unpriced extra is the telephone connection costs for ftp uploads, prices at the current British Telecom rates (approximately 5p/min daytime, 2p/min evenings, 1p/min weekend).

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