How It Started at the Basildon Keyboard Club
I have been interested in computers for over
twenty years and have a number of defunct computers in the loft. They are not
of any use but I just can’t get round to dumping them.My annual bonus at the end of 1999 went on yet another computer, this time with a modem inside it. I started surfing the web and thought that I could do better than some of the sites I came across. Like most people I had no idea where to start, fortunately I came across a piece of software called WebArtiste. This was very simple to use and even listed places that would take your web site free of charge. So by the end of February 2000 I was ready to publish my first web site. My chosen subject was of course the Basildon Keyboard Club. I put a visitor counter on the site and each day I had a look to see how many people had visited my masterpiece. My expectations of thousands turned to hundreds, then tens. But I was getting visitors because the counter was going up, then I realised the visitors were me checking the counter! My first breakthrough came with the Organ Web Ring I joined - suddenly I was receiving visitors. Margaret, the webmaster at Organfax, got in touch with me and gave some useful advice on using photographs and how they affect download times. I realised I needed to know more about web sites so I started buying magazines and soon found out that my web site provider was ranked very low on speed. I discovered could easily swap to another much faster provider - again free of charge. Slowly I started to learn about web sites Then in 2001 I had a short stay in hospital where I had a few weeks to plan how I would spend my convalescence. I bought a book on HTML, the language of the web, and started to learn about it. I soon found my site was actually very poorly written and needed to be completely re-done. I managed to do most of this before I went back to work and now the site downloads 70% quicker than what it did before. I am continuing to learn more about the Internet and currently use a piece of software called 'Coffeecup' to write the pages for the web site. This gives complete control over how you make a page, but again needs an understanding of the HTML code used for making web pages. The last major change to the site was a switch to Cascading Style Sheets; to the viewer the only change should be quicker download times. The next change will probably be getting a domain name; this really helps in getting the site onto the search engines. Having reciprocal links with other sites of the same theme also helps your page get well known, and of course having a link from Organfax is a sure way to get visitors. Basildon actually has two sites, our own with nearly a hundred pages and another on Organfax which attracts thousands of visitors a day. I know no better place for a site which provides, of course, link to our own site. I cannot claim credit for everything on the club web site. Each month Catharina, the club secretary, writes a report of the concert for publication in the club newsletter. This is copied, modified into HTML, pictures added and published on our site. The site is not only about the Basildon Keyboard Club, it promotes all the other clubs in the area and publicises the main festivals when we know about them. The site has received a few awards, the one I am most proud of is the Bobby award, this is for making the site available to the blind and partially sighted, and it means I have to make a bit of extra effort when preparing a page - but I think it is worth it. Read my feature on web page design by clicking here. Click here to to to the Basildon Keyboard Club Back to Contents Menu Return to Main Page. |