It is possible to strike it rich by selling your web site to Google or another big operator.
With that in mind, we bring you the tale of one man and his web site - getting the man himself (John Hill, who's fought off all bidders so far, cough!) to explain the genesis of daytripstoeurope.co.uk.
Read about John's trials, tribulations and tips and share with us here your own experiences creating web sites.
Last edited by Bob Crabtree; 19-04-2007 at 11:26 AM.
Unlike the parent in this thread, I created a site entirely devoid of content - www . bobpitch . com
BP, as I affectionately shall refer to it, is a homage to the popular waste of time site Popbitch. The initial idea was that I wished to replicate the look and feel of PB, with a slightly more relaxed editorial policy - I just wanted people to turn up and ramble away to each other about whatever they felt like - build it and they will come etc.
Initial version was on PL/SQL on Oracle running on my ADSL - not an especially popular configuration and I rapidly learnt why.
First proper version was PHP/MySQL/Apache and it's stayed on that to this day, with the server beneath it growing from an initial Linux share, to a proper dedicated dual-core monster that it's run on today.
Design has quietly progressed from the initial 'messages' on a single page to do some more interesting things. None of these features are really required, but they were ideas I wanted to see happen and once you've got the framework built, it's not too hard to add on the extra stuff.
There's an email server with a couple of webmail front ends. Ability to MMS pictures from your phone in and receive replies as SMS. Google Maps integration showing you who's where and what they're saying. Internal messaging. Email integration.
Anway, enough of that.
It's been running for a few years and my only input's been a hundred k or so of code. Out of that, I've made a little comunity that's so far racked up 4.6 Million posts - which is really quite a lot whenever I think about it.
All been stable for a while now and I'm now not quite sure what to do with it. My intention is to stop hacking it and go back through the code to produce something re-usable. Easiest option is to just Open-Source it and give it away - but that isn't going to make me rich. I suspect selling it wouldn't make me rich either though and would just be a pain in the arse.
Anyhow, if you're at a loose end and want to see how to build a completely pointless, yet somehow surviving site - Bobpitch . com
Just in case anyone is worried - goldcd's site - http://www.bobpitch.com - does seem to me to be pretty much what he says.
Bob C
Just what we need, more websites with broken markup, no alt tags, pages of text 100's of lines long, and main links that conspicuously disappear. Oh well, at least there's no AJAX...
To err is human. To really foul things up ... you need a computer.
What the hell? Just looked at the source for daytripstoeurope.. that code could do with a bit of tidying up, there are like 50 carriage returns between each code block..
But.. My pennethworth about website design.
1. If you want to learn how to code web pages, then NEVER touch software designed for it, a notepad like editor will suffice - that way you'll learn faster, learn how to debug (especially if you're using PHP/AJAX) and you can optimise your code.
2. Make sure you validate your site using the W3C validator. This will ensure that everyone else can see your site properly (of course almost every CSS user despises IE with a vengeance, but that can't be helped..). Things like "alt" tags on pictures and making sure that your tag order is correct (not so much of an issue now, but it still happens).
3. CSS and XHTML are amazingit's well worth learning about how to make websites without the <table> tag and using <div> and <span> instead. CSS also makes it a lot easier to do a complete revamp of a website's design scheme (fonts, colours, etc.)
4. It's worth having some sort way of organising code, like using tabs, makes it a LOT easier to work out which closing tags belong to which.
5. This is more of a personal opinion, but try not to go heavy on the pictures - especially animated gif's - we've all seen Scan.co.uk in it's former gloryIf you have to have a photoshopped uber amazing template then fine, but bear in mind that some people have slower connections and an image heavy website is no fun if you have to wait for 5 minutes for it to load.
Hope this helps
Here's my "WIP" site: www.struckbylightning.co.uk
Last edited by Whiternoise; 19-04-2007 at 10:16 PM.
The daytripstoeurope.co.uk website really could do with a redesign, not least in the way it scales.
It appears as a extremely narrow column (640x480?) of centered text on my WS monitor.
Couldn't the web designer have scaled the site better? It would be worth him getting some input from some more web savvy users.
Last edited by davidstone28; 22-04-2007 at 01:00 AM.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding what you are saying, I think you are coming at this from the wrong direction.Originally Posted by davidstone28
John knows that readability is massively increased by having text at a narrow measure.
Compare the readability of the extract below (and remember what you are seeing there is a relative low-res JPEG, not the original text) with the readability of, for example, this forum posting or you own - which are not of restricted width.
There's no doubt in my mind that John's readability is greater.
And readability, I'm sure, is the reason for him setting up the text the way he has.
Now compare his text widths to those that you see here on the BBC's site.
I suspect they're very similar - though it looks to me like the Beeb is using a slightly bigger size of font, which John's site may be better off using.
It's also the case that the Beeb page has far fewer pics but if it did have the same picture-density as John's site, it would look very similar.
Oh and one thing that people commenting here have all seemed to have missed, is the whole point of the article that John wrote.
He was highlighting the fact that it is possible to create a site that looks good (and he thinks it does - and I agree) and does the job intended quite well (which it does) without needing necessarily to get your hands very dirty with HTML coding.
It wasn't written for coding purists, it was written to spark the imagination of Joe Public.
This is always intresting about web sites.... Why are people slating the fact he's not using 'their' favourate method?
Fact is the content isn't bad, its very readable, still looks good when you have font sizes to max (like on a media PC on a tv).
Now, lets have some debunking. DIV vrs Table is stupid argument. This site is all static data and will load really swiftly as such. So whinging about the use of tables is pointless.
People have already mentioned AJAX.. but why is it needed?
You can flame me all you like, but even wikipedia pretty much admits its largly due too MS's work in internet scripting (which was largely funded too get the web interface for outlook).
Why does this site at present need it?
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
it's nothing to do with that, and everything to do with accessibility
mixed content and design means data can't be usefully parsed by a machine - which, for example, blocks blind users from reading your site (screen readers will spent ages talking crap, e.g. try visiting the site in a tableless text-only browser like lynx and imagine how it would sound read out loud)
fair enough, some people might not care about making their data machine-readable as well as human-readable. some might hate blind people. but the fact remains that there are good reasons to use css-based layout
but what about people who are using a psion series 5 too browse the web, that can't understand any of the divs.
The point about accessability is a valid one, but last time i did any web work (i really do hate it) it was a case of really working things too it, rather than just using spans.
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
I dont think anyone said the site needed AJAX.. i think my comments were pretty valid, and easy to fix in the context of a static site, with a view to improving it for a larger audience.
To err is human. To really foul things up ... you need a computer.
CSS degrades gracefully
Accessibility aside, i think divs are still far more flexible than tables, you can't (afaik) float a table on top of another table for example.
I suppose there is an argument that if your website only caters for a certain demographic, then you can assume that your users will have CSS enabled browsers - for instance if you had a gaming website devoted to say CnC online tournaments, there would be a high chance that people reading the site will have a windows pc using IE or somesuch.
Last edited by Whiternoise; 22-04-2007 at 09:00 PM.
I'm a total geek. I whole hartedly addmit.
But i think people are missing hte point, something like this, its not having DIVs, or TABLES. thou i do like the uptopian idea of every platform, even for people who are blind/dislexic/welsh.
But content is the most important thing for a site like this. And the present content isn't bad. Well done and get some more.
I find that thanks too work i've not got much free time (and getting holiday is difficult, lots more work) but i do have cash for 'nipping abroad' been reading some of the articals their not bad
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
Oh i agree, the content is the most important (though i will say that i don't like the use of javascript to open new windows) and this website is better than a lot of other travel sites i've seen.
Like Bob says: "It wasn't written for coding purists, it was written to spark the imagination of Joe Public." (which the photography more than achieves)
But.. meh i just think that if you want to use a design app then that's fine, but i would personally prefer to use coding because it's more flexible.
Last edited by Whiternoise; 23-04-2007 at 09:51 PM.
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