Numismatic and History Discussion Forums > Ancient Coin Forum
Meepzorp's coin website
Meepzorp:
Hi folks,
As many of you are aware, I finally finished correcting/updating my coin tags. I am now ready to start documenting my entire collection by taking photos and posting them online.
My preference is to create my own website. If that doesn't work, I will post the photos here in Forum. But I want to give that (creating my own website) a try first.
I've never done this before, and my knowledge of computers is from the 1980s. But I have a mechanical mind, and I learn fast. My niece and her boyfriend are going to be assisting me. But neither one of them has ever created a website before.
Using GoDaddy, I already created a domain name. But that may not have been necessary.
I asked owner Joe if he would host my website, and he said yes. But this situation creates a lot of questions.
If Joe hosts my website, will I still have to install Wordpress or something similar? How do I do that?
Can anyone recommend any good online tutorials for this specific situation (where Joe will be hosting my website)? Most online tutorials that I found are for people who don't have someone else hosting their website.
What type of software will I need, if any?
How do I physically go about creating the website?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for any assistance.
Meepzorp
Andrew McCabe:
Meeozorp
I hope Doug chimes in on this as he is the founding genius of numismatic website designs. Although I started my site a dozen years ago, Doug's was the Ur-coin-website.
One big question is where you'll store your thousands of picture files. Writing a basic webpage to display the pics with your text is relatively easy. You can just write the website yourself, using html, following the guidance here
http://www.w3schools.com/html/
This is appropriate for very simple text based websites, with pictures hosted elsewhere. The pictures are then embedded wherever you want using what's called the "html code" for an image. Most picture hosting websites will have a html code for each picture, either below the picture or in some drop down menu. Usually the picture html code has a width and length dimensions in pixels, which you can change to get it the right size.
That's what I did. I uploaded my pictures to Flickr, then just wrote a simple webpage in 2004 to include text, links to other webpages of mine, and embedded pictures using the html code Flickr gave me. It's quite fun and not so difficult. It has the great advantage that you are not dependent on a website-design programme which might go out of business or change pricing. Then you just give the code (as a text file) to whoever hosts your website eg Forum. And that's it.
An alternative is to copy the code of any website you like. For example Nick Molinari might be happy to let you reuse his code. You could also use my code but I wouldn't recommend it for a start because my website is vast, and as well laid out as Naples. So choose a simple website as a template. Your browser will have an option to look at and copy the code of a website. However I would warn that copied code may be much more complex than you would expect, especially if originally written using some professional website design software. It's rarely a simple option. At least if you write the code yourself you will understand it. Which means you'll be able to adapt it as the years pass. I'm in year 12 of my website. I guarantee that the website design programs from 2004 are all long out of business.
Then another alternative is to use something like WordPress which will allow you to put together a basic website quickly - but without you writing or understanding the code.
A fundamental question you'll need to consider is whether the pictures for the website will be hosted by the website host (such as Forum) or on another site (such as Flickr). If your website host also hosts the pictures it may seem initially simpler but there may be space limitations or limits on individual picture sizes. And it means that if you transfer your website to a different host, you would need to reload all the pictures again.
Other alternatives is to just use picture gallery software: Upload your pics to Forum and add your own text. Or to a photo hosting website such as Flickr, and add your text. Frankly the reason the Forum website awards died out is because gallery sites have replaced self designed websites (and gallery sites weren't eligible). You can add lots of text on such sites nowadays.
You can also consider setting up a facebook page for your collection, and adding all your coin pictures there.
I recommend you buy a beginners book on the subject (Idiots guide to making your own website).
I also recommend you design and upload a very simple website (for example with the classic text "Hello World", followed by a single coin image) before you go too far. That'll give you insight into the different steps in the process.
Arados:
Very sound advice from Andrew.
I ran my own website many years ago and used HTML codes, eventually i gave up due to the enormous effort of keeping the site updated (this website was not numismatic related). I personally found the coding hard work and tedious, albeit educational.
A couple of years ago i started my own FLICKR account, this was influenced by the great work Andrew had achieved with his site. Simultaneously i started designing my own wordpress blog/website, this endeavour took me at least one and a half years. I lost count of the number of times i started from scratch before finally being satisfied with the appearance. Eventually i settled on a similar look for both my FLICKR and wordpress sites, using the same avatar and background images.
Both of my current sites are drag & drop, this method helps me enormously due to lack of time i can spend updating.
Molinari:
Meep, You can certainly borrow any code you want from my site, but I wouldn't know how to find it or what any of it means. I guess you have to determine which method you find easiest to work with. I don't have time to learn code and I like the categorical layout Wordpress offered, but learning how to use wordpress as a fixed site takes time and patience too. However, after the books are finished we'll probably switch over to the same gallery software that Forvm galleries use (Coppermine), which I think will be neater for the large areas (Neapolis, Gela, etc.).
PeterD:
--- Quote from: Meepzorp on October 11, 2015, 09:13:21 am ---
How do I physically go about creating the website?
Meepzorp
--- End quote ---
This is the bottom line answer.
First you create a web-page(s) using HTML code. This can, if necessary, be created on a simple word-processor such as Notebook. When finished change the file extension to ".HTM" or ".HTML". If you want to see what such a page looks like go to https://www.forumancientcoins.com/historia/coins/r6a/r23791.htm and right click and select 'View Page Source' (I assume you are using a full size Windows computer). You will see the web page as plain text and be able to identify the descriptive texts from the normal web-page. You will also see many 'tags'. You need to define many things, such as font sizes or line returns, using tags. Tags are also used for defining links to other pages to insert pictures.
You may decide that this is too much and use software such as Wordpress to create web-pages. You can create web-pages in Word although I wouldn't recommend it. Although I have some 800 pages on my web-site, I basically created a half dozen basic pages and made the rest by copying and editing.
What happens when you have created your web-pages? First of all, you don't have to upload them to see if they work. You can view them in a browser direct from your hard-drive by double clicking on an HTM file (in Windows Explorer, for example). When you have the name and password of your web-space (my name for example is ftp://forumancientcoins.com/historia) upload all your files (including any file structure). Note the 'ftp' in my address. That takes you to a file structure similar to what you see in Windows Explorer and you can copy and paste or drag files as you would there.
I have to disagree with Andrew about storing pictures. Keep the picture files with the HTML files, not on a separate server. This is the code for the page outlined above. < IMG src="r23791.jpg" width="500" height="250" border="2" > -very simple. As I said, I have some 800 odd pages with the same amount of pictures all in the same place with no problems.
I hope that answers your basic question. The devil is in the detail, of course.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version