Editor's note: This is the sixth in a 12-part, "hands on" series about the wonderful world of adult Website building. The resulting site will have been built by real people who have no Web-building experience and no inside experience in the adult industry. Their names have been changed to protect their real identities and their mainstream business interests.
Any Web design guru will acknowledge that the tools a designer chooses to use greatly affect the outcome of a project. Web-building purists will say, emphatically, "Hand coding is the only way to go!" Most of these folks progressed through the ranks from novice to expert when the Web was young and the only option for building HTML pages was to learn the tags and write the code in a text editor - like Wordpad or Notepad. This is an arduous, tedious task that very seldom results in the creation of anything resembling a usable page on the first attempt. Even the most experienced are prone to dropping a bracket here and there and omitting a "close" or "end" tag occasionally.
The advent of what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext markup language editors proved a boon to the Net industry as a whole, freeing newbies from the onerous task of learning HTML code from scratch and allowing experienced coders to pick up the pace of their design work. Early products like HotDog and HoTMetaL, although somewhat clumsy in certain respects, represented easy ways for non-coders not only to create basic Web pages quickly and easily, but also to pick up the look and feel of HTML code by association, because as a WYSIWYG page began to take shape, the underlying code was generated automatically and presented next to it in a separate window.
Current-generation WYSIWYG HTML editors are produced by a number of companies including Adobe (www.adobe.com), Allaire (www.allaire.com), Macromedia (www.macromedia.com), Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), NetObjects (www.netobjects.com), Sausage Software (www.sausage.com), and SoftQuad (www.softquad.com). All have strengths and weaknesses; some are more appropriate for beginners than others, and some offer add-ons that increase functionality. Almost all of them allow manual editing of automatically generated code. Some - like Microsoft's FrontPage - incorporate rudimentary image-editing tools, and some facilitate the inclusion of the latest trends in online coding, like dynamic HTML (DHTML) and extensible markup language (XML).
The difference in price from the simplest to the most complex can be enormous, so when it comes to the big question, "Which is the best one for me?" the best answer is "Try them all and determine that for yourself." All of them offer free evaluation versions for just that purpose.
Of course, for those who prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, hand coding continues to be a viable option. While requiring less initial cash outlay because it can be done with any plain, garden-variety text editor, hand-coding can be much more costly in man hours, as some time must be spent learning the language. A number of excellent resources for learning HTML are available on the Net, however, including an excellent one produced by Eric A. Meyer and hosted by Case Western Reserve University at www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html.
Because the adult Web is graphics intensive, another essential tool for adult site designers is a good image creation and editing tool. Designers who are tackling their first adult site may want to keep graphics to a minimum because of bandwidth and storage space concerns, opting for little more than a small logo, a sponsor's banner or two, and a few images on each page. Banners and images generally will be provided by the sponsor, and some enticing, optimized Web graphics can be obtained for free from Webmaster resource sites like Adult NetSurprise (www.adultnetsurprise.com). To create logos and other artwork, though, a good graphics program is a must.
Two affordable programs are Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro ($99; www.jasc.com) and Ulead's PhotoImpact ($89.95; www.ulead.com). Both offer a bevy of creation and editing tools - including image optimization for the Web - and are reasonably easy to learn to use. Ulead actually offers a suite of Web graphics tools; among them are several varieties of animation programs and a 3D converter.
Of course, the winner and still champion in the category is Adobe's Photoshop. At $609, it's far too expensive for most new Webmasters to afford, but the latest version of the product does everything a Webmaster could desire of a Web graphics processing program, all in one tidy little package.
Worth noting here is that, in many cases, photos on Websites are run in thumbnail sizes. The thumbnails serve as links to larger versions of the images for the sake of page-loading rapidity. Although thumbnails can be created individually by simply changing the size of the original image and renaming the resulting file (jenna3-thumb.jpg might be the name of the thumbnail corresponding to the larger image jenna3.jpg, for example), the process can become quite tiresome when a large batch of images needs to be processed.
Two good software packages that address this problem are ThumbsPlus ($74.95; www.cerious.com) and Gallery Maker Pro ($79.95; www.thegrid.net/sjpsoftware/gmp). Both process entire directories of images at one time and are capable of creating Web pages of the resulting images while they're at it. The best of the bunch in this case is Arles Image Web Page Creator (www.digitaldutch.com/arles/). At $49 for a single-user license, it's a deal, allowing the user intimate control over every aspect of every variable about the images and pages imaginable.
Of course, building a site is just one step along the way to making money from it. Once it's ready to be tested, the pages must be transferred to a Web server. Some WYSIWYG HTML editors, like FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion, include transfer utilities. In other cases, Webmasters will want to ensure they have a good file transfer protocol (FTP) software package on hand. Two of the best of this breed are GlobalScape's CuteFTP ($39.95; www.cuteftp.com) and Ipswitch's WS FTP ($39.95; www.ipswitch.com/Products/WS_FTP/index.html). The user interfaces differ, but the products do essentially the same thing, and both of them do it very well: They transfer pages, graphics, scripts, etc. between a Web server and a desktop machine.
In addition to FTP, Webmasters also will want to familiarize themselves with telnet. Though telnet usually doesn't enter the Web building equation until a Webmaster has at least a little bit of experience under his or her belt and wants to install a Perl script or something similar, practice in advance of need never hurts. Telnet utilities usually are included as part of contemporary computers' operating systems.
Now that the basic Webmaster toolkit has been defined, it's time to get to work.
Next: Design over matter.
Previously: Drive space and bandwidth.
