Setting Up Your Bands Web Site Is As Easy As 123 With MyWebServer

Building and running your bands web site doesn't have to be that hard. All you need is a DSL/Cable/Broadband internet connection and a copy of the MyWebServer freeware program and your half way there.

MyWebServer will help you build your home page and comes with several built in virtual pages that can be linked to your home page without you having to get your hands dirty (writing any html code).

Step One

What are you going to say about your band.

As an example lets make a web site for the legendary band Spinal Tap. You can write your home page in a text editing or word processing program. I entered some text about Spinal tap into the notepad program that comes with windows (Start Button | Programs | Accessories | notepad).

About the above file

There are a few HTML 'tags' located within the text. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup language. The tags tell the web browser that is displaying the page to do something special at that point in the text. The tags are self contained and always begin with a '<' and end with a '>' to identify them.

The file contains 4 paragraphs of text separated by the html 'paragraph' tag <P>. The <P> tag tells the web browser that is displaying this page to make a paragraph break at this location. There are also 4 other parts of the page that are using the paragraph tags for seperation.

After the 4 paragraphs of text there is a html 'img' (image) tag. This tag tells the web browser to display the image named spinaltap.gif which is located in the images directory. Since this page is the home page or first page that will be displayed when someone goes to the web site the reference to the images directory means that this page will be located in the web servers Root directory. This is the top directory in the web site and all pages or files that will be available in the website must be located in this directory or in a directory that is within this directory or one of its sub directories. In the above example the images directory is located in the MyWebServer root directory.

The final two items on the page are links to the bands music library and photograph library. They are enclosed in HTML 'Anchor' (Link) tags. This tag tells the web browser to display a link (underlined text that you click on for navigation). Most all HTML tags come in pairs the second of the pair always has the same tag name but has a '/' before it to signify that its an end teg. Technically even the <P> paragraph tag should be followed by a <P/> tag at the end of the paragraph This rule is not heavily enforced so you can use the <P> tag by itself. The beginning of an anchor begins <A href="some_url"> with then contains the text to be underlined and then the ending anchor tag</b>. The href="some_url" clause is a property of the tag that tells the web browser what web page you would like to load. It can contain a complete url like http://www.bandsRus.org or just the name of a file or directory or the directory path from the location of the present page and file name. If you specify a directory name when someone clicks on the link MyWebServer will look in that directory for a default web page file named index.html and display the HTML page in it. If there is no default.html file in that directory MyWebServer will display a list of files located in that directory that you can view or download. Which is what we did in this example.

The first Anchor says 'To Visit Our Music Library Click Here' and refers to a directory named 'music' located in the same directory as this page. This is where we are going to place the bands music files in step two below.

The second Anchor says 'To View More Band Photographs Click Here' and refers to a directory named 'images' located in the same directory as this page. This is where we are going to place the bands photograph files in step two below.

I did not change the location MyWebServer was installed in or the webs Root directory location in step two of the installation process so a MyWebServer was created at C:\Program Files\MyWebServer and a root directory for MyWebServer was placed inside that directory at C:\Program Files\MyWebServe\WWWRoot.

Step Three

I Created a music directory in the MyWebServer root directory.

I Created an images directory in the MyWebServer root directory as well.

I copied all the bands mp3 files into the music directory.

I copied all the bands .gif and .jpg photographs into the images directory.

My WWWRoot directory then looked like this.

About The Web Sites File Heirarchy

Directly in the WWWRoot directory are the following 4 items. homepage.html The home page we just created in step 3 of the MyWebServer installation process. index.html A frame container that contains the homepage.html page on the top and MyWebServers Virtual Toolbar Page of buttons at the bottom. Music a directory full of Spinal Tap mp3 files Images a directory full of Spinal Tap photographs

That's all there is to the web site creation and installation.

Accessing the new site

I Clicked on the 'Home 1' button on the MyWebServer Control panel. My web browser was launched and I was looking at the Spinal tap home page.
Click Here To See What It looked Like

Then I clicked on the Music Link and I was looking at a list of Spinal Taps music I could listen to or download. I listened to a Spinal tap song.
Click Here To See What It looked Like

I went back to the home page and I clicked on the Photographs Link I could see a list of spinal tap photos I could view or download. I clicked on each of the photo links and viewed he photos.
Click Here To See What It looked Like

Other People On The Internet Accessing The Site

I am lucky enough to have a static IP address so I could add a link to my site on the BandsRUs web site and give the sites adderss to all my friends.

If I did not have a static IP address I would need to do one of the following things to get a static internet address so I could add a link to my site on BandsRUs and give it to all my friends.

1. Use A Free Web Site and MyWebServer's Virtual DNS Feature
2. Use ICQ To get a static internet address
3. Use some other Dynamic DNS service to get a static internet address

For more info on Spinal Tap Click Here

 

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