My Experience with Setting up a Web Site

A step by step guide to setting up our first website - what we did and how we did it.

My website PlayMassive.com has been under construction for quite some time and is now in it's final stages before it's release. This article will be a guide for all who wish to learn how to change domain registrars, set up a hosting account and put a website online.

Follow step by step explanations of what the PlayMassive crew themselves have experienced through pushing the website to an online state and their changing of domain registrars from yahoo to enomcentral. With screenshots and explanations this guide will take you through PlayMassive's steps so that you can get a clear idea of how it may be done for your own website. Enjoy the Guide!

Transferring Domain Name from Yahoo to Enomcentral Registrar

Our domain name was initially registered through Yahoo however we decided to change registrars first to Enom, here is how we did it.

The first step is to log in to your small business account in Yahoo and proceed to the control panel. Once in the control panel scroll down and view your authorization code (you will need the authorization code to enable your new registrar to verify your domain ownership) by clicking the "view your authorization code" link near the bottom of the page. Once you have obtained your authorization code head back to your control panel. From there verify if your domain is currently locked, if it is click the "edit domain locking" link and unlock your domain. Your domain name must be unlocked to facilitate transfer.

Now sign in to your enomcentral account, once in your account click the "Domain" link near the top of the page followed by "transfer domain". At that point make sure "Auto Verification" is clicked, then enter the url address, along with the authorization code that you have retrieved for your domain in the yahoo control panel. You may then submit your order and the transfer will be pending, it can take anywhere from a couple of days to a week and a confirmation E-mail will be sent to you by your old domain registar shortly before the transfer occurs. This email is to confirm you initiated a transfer and wish to go ahead with it.

Waiting for the Domain Transfer

Now that PlayMassive's transfer is initiated and we are waiting on its completion we thought it would be a good time to find a statistics program and prepare some basic root directory files.

Counting the Hits to the Website and How the Visitors got there.

It is a good idea to find some way to track hits and referrals to your website. This will help us keep track of all the visitors who come to our website and will even tell us what they were searching for.

We decided to sign up with sitemeter at sitemeter.com. Without a program like sitemeter you are totally blind and can not keep track of how many people came to your website, and how they found it. Sitemeter also provides us with a lot of useful information in regards to our visitors screen resolution, location, and landing/exit pages.

Both signing up and using Sitemeter is completely free of charge making it a very handy tool essential for any respectable website. Once you have signed up all you need do is copy and paste a small code on your website in order for your stats to be tracked.

Four Files you Should Add to the Root Directory (public_html or www on some servers)

There are many little tricks that can help make your website more professional, while making you more friendly to search engines at the same time. Documents that you can insert in your main directory where your index file is contained. We will be listing a few of them here along with explanations of what they do.

1/ Robots.txt

When this txt file is inserted to your main directory it will give you control of what pages can or cannot be verified and searched by search engines. You can also use it to exclude a certain seach engine from being able to search your site. You can easily make this by yourself and this is how to do it.

Open your notepad and save it in your main directory as robots.txt. Some malware search engines are used to find weaknesses in your website or to find your E-mail adress so that they can send you spam E-mails. In these cases you can block them out by using the robots.txt. The first thing the majority of search engines will do before searching through your directories is to seek a robots.txt file. If they do not find one they will then go through your index page and move on throughout your website. Here is a few examples of what you can do.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

By writing the preceding in robots.txt file you will disallow ALL search engines to search your site. In this manner your entire site is locked and the search engines have no access to it. The star that you insert for User-agent means that all search engines are concerned and subject to what you disallow them to view. Something else you can do is the complete opposite.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

By putting nothing for Disallow you are giving access to all search engines, along with the permission to search and verify your entire website. You can also choose to specify what search engines are subject to these instructions as the following example demonstrates.

User-agent: Google
Disallow:

In this case Google's search engine will be able to search your entire website.

User-agent: Bad search engine
Disallow: /

In this case you disallow Bad search engine to search your website. You can also choose to make only a few files in your website private and out of reach for the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
             /cgi-bin/
             /jokes/

In this case the search engines are not to verify your cgi-bin, private page and the jokes file.

2/ 404 Page

There are many 404 error pages that have been already written up, and that are available all over the World Wide Web. You can simply search on google and you will fall upon some very quickly. What this will do is if ever someone goes through a dead link where no page is available within your website, the 404.shtml will replace the normal Internet Explorer error by a custom message.

For example you may choose to re-direct them to your home page or mention that the page is either expired or simply missing. In most cases you can be more clear about the situation then the normal Internet Explorer error page.

All you have to do is a simple html page like any other page on your website. Then save it as 404.html inside your main directory. This will replace any missing pages that a user may get to within your website by your 404.html page, notifying them that the page is missing. Many people have done unique pages for the 404 error, some have made it funny while others have made it to be professional. Only keep in mind that it is to be only a small page describing that there is nothing at that given location, do not make it too big and keep it to the point so that the search engines don't see it as a doorway to your website.

3/ .htaccess file

When used properly a .htaccess file in your main or root directory can make all the difference when it comes to the security of your website. We will now revise all of the possibilities and valid commands you may implement with the .htaccess file. Here is some important information that not all webmasters may know about, many internet users will not write a complete URL. For example if I were to go to www.google.com, I may type it in the adress bar as google.com without the (www). Now what happens is that most search engines will see (www.google.com) and (google.com) as a different website. This also quite often happens when other websites link to your with and without the www (www is really a subdomain of your website) This can penalize you as it is seen as two completely different websites with the exact same content.

There is a way however, to automatically add the World Wide Web abbreviation in front of your domain name when a user leaves it out. Making it impossible to fall on your website without the (www). In this way you cannot be penalized by the search engines, and the user will always fall on www.mysite.com even if the beginning www is left out.

Here is the code that is to be added into your .htaccess file to redirect non www.mysite.com to mysite.com.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Simply create a notepad file and replace mysite.com with your own url - save the file as htaccess.txt and upload the file to the root directory (public_html) of your webspace. Once uploaded rename the file on your server to .htaccess

Favicon

Something that can add a little touch to a website is the well known favicon.ico. What this does is it replaces the Internet Explorer image next to your websites name by a different image. In this case being the image of your choice, adding a logo next to your url when your website is bookmarked. It is incredibly easy to do, simply insert the desired image into an online favicon generator and put the completed favicon.ico into your main directory. The link to such a generator is FavIcon from Pics