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by the author Anthony A. Luscre and all rights are reserved.
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Create a Ham Radio Web Page Probably the ideal written way to easily share your ham radio knowledge is to create your own web page. Work at your own pace. There are no deadlines and it is easy to change mistakes or update information. Your work is available to your audience, immediately worldwide with no mailing or printing costs. You control the content, style and functionality.
You may have heard that web sites are expensive, hard to maintain and require learning all that HTML stuff. The good news is that these are all myths (usually put out by people who want to impress you with their own web site or want to charge you to design and build your site,)
Web Site Hosting You can create a site for free thanks to Alan L Waller, K3TKJ and his free hosting of ham radio web sites at http://www.qsl.net. He got myself and many, many others started in producing our first web sites. Alan's work is a real gift to the ham community. To learn more, stop by http://www.qsl.net. Then start your own ham radio website and make a donation to help support his fine efforts.
If your site outgrows QSL.net, you can find hosting companies that will host your website and even let you register your own domain (i.e. www.yoursite.com) Rates starting at under $7 a month are easy to find. Do a web search for web site hosting. There are also other “free” site hosting offers but most carry advertising on your pages and require you to use their domain (i.e. www.geocities.com).
Creating Web Pages No need to know HTML coding to build your first site. If you can word process, you can build a web page. Free, easy to use, WYSIWG software called Composer is available from www.mozilla.org. I built all the pages on my site using Composer.
If you want to create more complex pages, Macromedia and Adobe make excellent (but not inexpensive) software called Dream Weaver and Go Live respectively. The learning curve can also be fairly steep on both of these products. A very popular in-between product from Microsoft is Front Page (personally not my favorite as it often uses proprietary coding schemes and results in “bloated code”.)
Try the free Composer first and save yourself the time invested in the steep learning curve and some cash.
Content, Content, Conten The main reason that I suggest that you keep the page creation simple is so you can concentrate on the content. If location is everything in real estate, content is everything in getting return visitors to your web site. If you build it and it provides users with information they can use, they will come!
If you want them to return, make sure you keep content up to date, useful and dynamic (adding new content frequently.)
Five basic content varieties include: links to other sites, original content, content from other sources, databases and interactive forms:
Links to Other Sites Links are a way to direct users to helpful information at other web sites. Successful linking is dependent on selecting and grouping helpful sites. You need to visit sites you plan on linking to and evaluate each site’s content. Ask yourself the following questions:
· Is the information accurate and kept up to date?
· Does it fit in with other sites you are linking to?
· Does it provide important information for a visitor to your site?
· Is the content already well represented in your other links?
· Does it fill a void in information lacking in your other links
Finally, frequently check the links from your page to make sure they are not “broken” (is the other site still online, is the address still correct, and is the content still relevant?)
Original Content Links are good, but what if everyone had web sites full of links to other sites and no content of their own? That would be like everyone listening and no one calling CQ, resulting in no QSOs. Original content does not have to be prize-winning prose.
Examples of content can be: simple lists of information, equipment photos, illustrations or schematics, the step by step description of how you solved a problem, built a better mouse trap, successfully modified a piece of equipment, descriptions of antenna projects, etc.
Content From Other Sources
You didn’t invent the resistor color code but having a handy copy on your web site can be very useful for someone who has forgotten whatever little mnemonic device they used to learn the color values. Do you have a friend who has plenty of information to share with the QRP community but doesn’t want to create their own web site?
Your local ham radio club’s newsletter editor might have plenty of content to share. Don’t forget about information/instructions for older equipment that many users may no longer have manuals for. Whenever you use content from others, make sure you obey all appropriate copyright laws. If you would like to reproduce material from another person’s web site instead of linking to it, contact the owner for written permission to use the material (this also includes photos and illustrations.)
Databases
Databases are collections of information in a user searchable format. Callbooks, QSL Managers and Online Log Books are some examples of popular databases on Amateur Radio web sites. Uploading of new data may be automated (daily download from FCC ULS) or manual (the web master has to upload new information or databases). In some cases, user input is possible (a common example is the ubiquitous online opinion polls).
Databases usually require more sophisticated coding then your average content page. Those with programming experience can often easily make the jump. Fortunately for the rest of us, many of the higher end webs designing packages have the ability to build interactive or database pages or we can acquire turnkey online database systems.
Interactive Forms
Similar to databases, interactive forms allow the page users to add or exchange information with the page owner or other users. One simple example is “Guest Books”. Online forums allow users to post questions and answers to each other and other page visitors. Even simple guest books can be adapted to other tasks. Last year when my local radio club ran a year long special event call sign for the Ohio Bicentennial (KO8HIO), we needed any easy way to know when someone else was using the call sign and what band they were using. Stations would leave a guest book entry stating starting time and band before transmitting. Before beginning operation, each station would check the online guest book to see if the call sign was in use. When an operator was finished, he would enter QRT or QSY information in the guest book.
Again, there are ready to use interactive coding page examples - or scripts - as they are known. You can check my web site for links to sources of free or inexpensive scripts.
Web Site Style and Design Your can let your imagination go wild with colors and graphics when designing your own web page. Unfortunately, a lot of the resulting pages can be hard on the eyes, difficult to read or very slow to load.
I could fill many pages with design suggestions (fortunately my available time will not let that happen.) My suggestion is to visit a number of web sites and find examples of styles that are easy on the eyes, easy to read, aesthetically pleasing and fast loading.
My top five suggestions are:
Use page and text colors that work well together
Avoid using excessive or difficult to read fonts
Control page layout by using tables and/or frames
Avoid pages that require the user to scroll right or left when reading
Optimize file size, resolution and quantity of graphics to avoid slow loading pages.
Static is Bad Always remember, you are writing a web page not a book, so there is no final copy. Web sites should always take advantage of their strongest point - flexibility. Revise, correct, update and add content frequently!