Executive summary (websites)

 

THREE LEVELS

 

(1) Hobby/Personal:  Use geocities or similar service. (free)

For: Novices (Little or no experience required)

 

(2) Not for profit/Small business:

For: Intermediates

 

Buy Dreamweaver -- use a maran.com book, video tutorials or a short class to bring you up to speed.

 

(3) Larger Business

For: Advanced  (including people wishing to program professionally)

 

Use asp.net.  Buy visual studio .net.  Program in  c#.net (recommended) or visual basic .net.  (Note: It is also possible to develop asp.net in studio MX 2004 but visual studio .net is probably  better for .net  overall).   You should also explore hardware load balancing solutions as they become available (outside the scope of this article series or author’s expertise. Maybe try Microsoft's Application Center -- software solution -- or www.f5.com -- hardware solution?????). Note: Java is also an option for large projects.

 

Caution: Technical Material gets dated very quickly (specially about the internet). This article was last (partially) revised middle 2005 C.E./1426 A.H. Please note that while we occasionally try to point out Muslim owned websites, many of the website resources referred to below are NOT Muslim owned. The author is a Muslim in the USA so many of the resources mentioned are based in the USA. This is the first article in a three article series. In general, the first article is targeted to novices, the second to intermediates, and the third to advanced. Advanced individuals may however find all three articles interesting. Novices could skim through the second the third articles if they wish.

How to build an Islamic website

© Copyrighted printed with author's permission.

How many of us have complained about the deceptions, distortions, half-truths and outright lies presented about Islam in the media? Now with the NEW media YOU can do something about it. What follows is an article on how to build an Islamic website.

(1) Starting Out

Here are a few misconceptions about building websites.

Actually it is possible to build a website without knowing how to program or without having to spend ANY money. All it takes is some time and effort. The easiest and cheapest (e.g. free) way to build a website is to go to any of the following www.homestead.com (small fee), http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/ (fast,free-ad supported), http://www.tripod.lycos.com/ (free - ad supported), http://angelfire.lycos.com/ and hometown.aol.com , www.moonfruit.com(small fee), http://pages.google.com. Just follow the simple instructions there. (note: If you don’t have a computer ,or even an internet connection, try using your local library "to surf the web"). Before you know it, you will have your very own website up and running for free.:

For many people this is all they will need to know (or want to know). If you are in this category you do not need to read the remainder of this article.

Useful tip: Let us say your website has been up and running for a few weeks, and you want to call your website www.islamicwell.com instead of www.islamicwell.homestead.com (the standard homestead setting) consider using a URL forwarding service at the place you register your new website name for the cheapest solution. You will have to spend some money registering www.islamicwell.com with someone like www.dotster.com or http://www.godaddy.com -- see www.registrarstats.com for market share info. (Important note: Your registration address will normally become available to the public if you register through the "whois" command. Of course having overenthusiatic website fans arrive at your doorstep may be a little overwhelming, or even being inundated with junk email. However do not feed "fake" information to the system, instead such individuals can check out legitimate privacy options offered by the register like network solution's private registrations if appropriate for a higher price.) . Having your own "web address" (e.g. www.islamicwell.com) has the additional and important advantage of allowing you to change your web hosting company transparently to the public, if you want to do that in the future, with minimum disruption to your existing users.

However, some Muslims have expressed concern about the large banner ads on some of these free webhosting sites. A few Muslims have used these free websites to learn how to set up a website before moving on to set up a website with a paid hosting service) or (a muslim one) www.muslimsonline.com (You may have to look under personal homepages.) If you are an Islamic Center wanting to put up a simple webpage you may also wish to check with http://www.icna.org/search/mosqueform.html

  1. Using a paid Hosting Service for your website.

You may decide to use a paid hosting service for some of the following reasons:

Once you have decided to use a paid hosting service the first question to ask is which company to use. Check for ranking or rating of various hosting companies. Check these links for reviews/ratings: http://www.webhostmagazine.com/ec/index.asp ,http://hostreview.com, www.hostsearch.com (Make sure the company allows for "cgi-bins"). This important to do since there are a (large) number of poorly managed and run web hosting companies out there. You will also need to register your "web address" with a company like www.dotster.com or http://www.directnic.net. . This will cost some money.

Note: One good web hosting company is www.futurequest.com (recommended). If you want to use a Muslim hosting company www.muntadanet.com offers web hosting. You will have to select either a linux or microsoft hosting solution. They are both about equal. Many people start with linux (e.g. cheaper) unless they are working with many Microsoft products or know visual basic in which case a microsoft hosting solution is definitely better. (If you do need a microsoft hosting company you can check out uplinkearth.com, www.superb.net (does windows and unix) and the reviews above). lunarpages.com (recommended) does SunOne asp (e.g. "linux asp"), php, perl (and also has a easy, but a tad expensive with exit fees, webbuilder to build websites) . (Also does not have a seperate media server -- difficult to cap users without one, telnet, runs php as cgi, but has cpanel). Amanah (http://www.amanah.com/en/index.asp) offers streaming video and other options.

Option #1:

If you have spare cash consider buying MS Frontpage Software. This powerful but easy to use program (e.g. you do not need to know how to program) will make developing a website easier. Spend an 1-2 hours on the Frontpage demo/tutorial and immediately start building a simple website. (However, consider avoiding the use of some more complex features of Frontpage like "Frontpage extentions" since some web hosting companies do not support them) Alternatively you can learn html – a simple web design language (see below) to build your website. You can also buy frontpage "templates" which will do a lot of the design work for you at http://www.thetemplatestore.com, http://www.shalltech.com or www.pixelmill.net

 

Option #2:

If you want to add a number of easily available features to your website consider learning some basic html. By far, the easiest way to learn basic html is this excellent book --- "Teach Yourself HTML Visually" by Ruth Maran. (See if your library has it, or click on the hyperlink to order it). Somewhat more complicated – but free—is this link for html tutorials. (http://html.tucows.com/designer/designtutmain.html also see http://www.w3schools.com (recomended) for other tutorials ). If you are writting in html, you may also find the following tools helpful. Try WS_FTP pro for transfering your files. ( www.ipswitch.com .) or http://filezilla.sourceforge.net. Compressing files for transfer can be done using winzip from www.winzip.com . (Note: If you have Windows XP you may be able to use compressed folders instead.) Finally you may find using the telnet option from MS Windows useful for editing your html files (Just click on "Start", then "Run..." and type "telnet").

(Important tip: Do keep your html and web contents simple. For example, using more complex html, like frames, may prevent certain older browsers or "search robots" from properly navigating your website. Adding numerous graphics may slow down the performance of your website for users with slow links to the internet.)

(Another tip : A very quick and easy way to put an article on your website is to compose it in something like Microsoft Word and then select under the "File" menu option chose "Save As ..." and chose "Save as type" to be "HTML Document" or "Save as Web page". Then just upload the html file to your web hosting company. Very simple. However do check the generated header of the document using notepad.)

One of the advantages of learning basic html is that incorporating "cgi programs" into one’s website becomes very easy. Typically, one would like to add mail lists, guest books, and other features to one’s website. To program these features would take a lot of time and money (and is beyond the scope of this article), therefore consider obtaining or buying these "features". http://www.resourceindex.com/ is a particularly good listing of these resources (some free, some for a price) since one can check "user ranking" (http://www.cgi-resources.com/rate/rated.html )of the different featured products. (Tip: Normally, try to limit consideration of cgi's to those with scores above 9.0 out of 10.0. Also check the level of security provided since some of the free/low cost programs are sometimes weak in this area. For example if you know perl, trying usr/bin/perl -T with the taint checking flag set on, and reading the source code to see if the input is properly validated to prevent system commands from being entered are recomended. (There is a more extensive discussion of this in "CGI programming 101" by J. Hamilton Chapter 16). Other possible security measures include the following. The cgi should check the caller and only allow referrers in its list -- although this can be faked. Sensitive files should be have their premissions set properly and/or be outside the www web tree area. Many scripts that store information in files should normally use something similar to flock(). (See the file locking discussion on perl.about.com). Those less familiar with perl can check ratings/reviews.) Another cgi script spot can be found at www.hotscripts.com (click on perl then on scripts and programs.)

Once you have selected your website feature programs, you will need to learn how to install them. There is an excellent article at www.execpc.com/~keithp/bdlogcgi.htm (note: it is a very slow link). Other website add-ons could include www.atomz.com or http://www.perlfect.com/freescripts/search/ or http://swish-e.org/, or even www.google.com (to allow users to search your website ), http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/?reg or weblog (awsd.com) for traffic statistics (also available from the host provider), islamic newsfeed for your site from iviews.com , polls http://www.event-handler.com/ (also http://phpsurveyor.sourceforge.net/ (recomended), survey monkey http://www.surveymonkey.com/ (hosted, more expensive), http://www.chumpsoft.com/products/phpq/,https://sourceforge.net/projects/uccass/), to http://www.communityarchitect.com (allow your users to build homepages). (Note: Of course if your third party provider goes bankrupt or becomes unresponsive this might create some problems if you, for example, are offering homepages and you are dependent on them. If you are offering homepages make sure you have a "TERMS OF USE" .) If you want to provide country specific content check out something like GEOIP (http://www.maxmind.com/ has a IP-> country mappings). (Note: If you use GEOIP you will have to do some coding yourself). If you just need email check out mail.yahoo.com or even hotmail.com. Most hosting providers however do provide email.

Advanced Features in a Website:

If you want to add audio/video-on-demand on your website the easiest way to do this is to purchase a package from www.dazzle.com. Dazzle's Digital Video Creator is a hardware peripheral you need to bring your ( analog ) video into the computer (via the parallel or USB port) to get digital files. The software that comes with the dazzle hardware allows you to do (very) simple video editing and to convert your files into a web compatible format (e.g. real audio or video) which you will upload to the hosting company's real server area. (If you have a digital miniDV camcorder and IEEE 1394 port (e.g. FireWire) or USB 2.0 on your PC -- it can be as simple as a file transfer. In this case you can consider visual communicator plus (simplest at http://www.seriousmagic.com/ -- windows player), pinnacle studio (www.pinnaclesys.com), adobe premiere (also available in the cheap, easy, excellent adobe premiere elements version), final cut pro and pro tools (in increasing order of cost)). Whether you have digital or analog input, your hosting provider also needs to be able to support your output format (e.g. normally real audio/video). (You will be need to read their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on this topic). www.islamicwell.com/nrobdir/bw1.htm has a possible sample of what one might do next. (For more information see http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/streaming.htm or an alternative http://cit.ucsf.edu/embedmedia/step1.php). Since audio and video consume a great deal of storage space this will drive up your hosting costs. (So select a hosting company that offers enough storage and transfer amounts.) You may wish to run your audio/video section on a separate, but linked, website. (Note: Be careful not to put copyrighted material on your website.) The audio/video part of the internet still has a long way to develop (specially the video) and it is a field in very rapid change and development. It will probably be another 5-10 years before things stabilize in this area. You will certain need to continually to monitor this. (Also look at websites similar to live365.com, http://www.playstream.com). Some interesting early trends include the following: https://upload.video.google.com/ , http://www.ourmedia.org/, http://mefeedia.com/, http://www.participatoryculture.org/bm/, http://antisnottv.net/, http://www.openmediacommons.org/. For a quick overview try http://www.freevlog.org/. You may also need feedburner for enhancing any RSS syndication you have (e.g smartfeed to convert atom to RSS, smartcast to upgrade to RSS 2.0 with enclosures, or to monitor statistics like circulation and clickthroughs. By the ways enclosures in items in RSS feeds is sort of like attachments are to emails. ) Looks like MPEG and MP3 are the current favored standards developing. This areas is changing dramatically so you need to follow it closely.


"Ecommerce" type activity

Tip: www.helping.org is a website done in association with the (non-Muslim) aol foundation. If your organization is registered as a charitable organizaiton with the US IRS you may be able to use their website for online donations.

Another tip: Selling items on your website: Here are some leads to investigate (also do your own independent research on this topic since this is a fast changing area, like many things on the internet) (1) See http://sellitontheweb.com/ezine/howto009.shtml for some payment processing options or http://www.aota.net/E-Commerce/nomerchantaccount.php4 . Digibuy (e.g. downloadable ebooks, software), iBill (e.g. subscriptions) and CCNow mentioned in the previous hyperlink, and (for a less fancy, cheaper solution) www.paypal.com (nice, very popular), www.plugNpay.com may be worth investigating. http://www.2checkout.com/ , http://www.propay.com/, http://www.c2it.com, http://www2.kagi.com/, http://www.clickbank.com (nice, very popular) and www.esellerate.net might also be worth checking out. One can also combine these services with others. For example, for digital goods (e.g. ebooks created with MS Word and Adobe Acrobat, etc.) investigate Paypal/payloadz or clickbank.com/clickbank toolkit. There are also some fulfillment companies you may wish to investigate (e.g. in addition to handling customer payment, they can also provide warehouse space and packing and shipping for you.--You continue to handle the marketing.) One may also wish to try to set up shop through through comprehensive pay websites focusing on this: Amazon zShop/Advantage Program and Yahoo store, see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/sell-items.html and store.yahoo.com. Other shop websites (lower starting costs) include http://www.neoverve.com/ (storesense product) which may currently offer free basic services. (premium services cost extra).

Yet Another tip: You may consider joining affliate or associate programs. This may help defray some of the costs of running your website. These programs pay "refferal/marketing partnership dollars." Amazon.com has an excellent program (They call it an associates program). astrolabepictures.com and soundvision.com are Muslim websites with such a program. One very important word of advice, do not go overboard in this area. Try to only choose well known programs. Also note that you are likely to make very little, if any, money doing this under normal circumstances.

"marketing your website"

Once you have built a basic website, you will need to get the word out.

  1. For primarily targeting muslims submit your website name to muslim search engines /top lists like http://www.my-muslim.net/, , http://www.islamseek.com/, www.muttaqun.com/topsites , www.musalman.com , www.islamtopsites.com , www.jannah.org and and/or publicize your "website address" at Muslim functions.
  2. If you are targeting both muslims and non-muslims: Also submit to general search engines as well. Yahoo is popular. Here is how to submit to Yahoo. (http://howto.yahoo.com/chapters/10/1.html ) Google (http://www.google.com/addurl.html) and the dmoz (http://dmoz.org/add.html) are two other places to consider. To find out about other search engines/meta tags see http://searchenginewatch.internet.com . Set up your description, title and meta-tags up properly. When other search engines send "robots" to index your website they will be able to use this information well. (For auto submission check out http://www.bilalphilips.com/services/webmaster/submit.htm). To find out some good meta tags for your website see http://sellitontheweb.com/ezine/opinion0321.shtml

Tip: For the above you may need to create a banner. http://www.bannertips.com/tools.shtml might help build one. http://www.animationonline.com/ is one possible free banner creation service. Also check out Just banners at http://www.lincolnbeach.com.

Another Important tip: Sometimes you might want to have a separate website for primarily a muslim majority audience and a different website for a non-muslim majority audience if the interests of both groups are quite different. This will help to keep your website more relevant.

 

Finally, once your website is built you will need some maintainance tools. For example to check the if the links on your site are still valid you could try a free link checker like chkweb.exe (search for it under www.google.com), or link valet at www.htmlhelp.com. You will also need to compress your JPEG (photographic) or GIF (non-photographic) web images with something like Ulead Systems' Smart Saver Pro (www.ulead.com) so they do not take forever to download. www.netmechanic.com or www.gifworks.com are possible websites with some free tools you might find useful. You will also find that certain things are easy to install but very labor intensive to maintain e.g. moderated public message boards ( ubb at infopop.com or http://groups.yahoo.com/). A well maintained and moderated message board takes x hrs/ per day forever. Religious boards that are not well moderated risk becoming places where hardening of the hearts takes place. If you are going to have a board try to moderate it. (By the ways, do not even consider a public message board unless you meet several parameters including certain minimum or consistent traffic. If you want to do mailing list/ announce only group lists (which are a little easier to deal with since their is no incomming traffic) or if you do discussion boards make the ability to post only available to registered users (to make life a little easier for yourself). If you are doing a small amount of mail you could consider a cgi-bin solution like mojomail (see rankings on http://www.cgi-resources.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/Mailing_Lists/). If you have more mail for performance reasons your webhost will probably ask your to use their pre-packaged mail solution on their own mailservers. For even more mail, you can also look into closely related mailing lists managed by third parties like www.biglist.com. (You can also explore using templates for ads/newsletters using an outlook express add-on like high impact with its available template packs at http://www.templatezone.com/msoffice/hiemail/). Do NOT send spam. (see www.sparklist.com/CAN-SPAM/ )

Of course, the subject of building a website is a vast one, and the design tools and techniques are constantly changing, so this is all we will delve into in this article. . As you can see building a website can be as easy or difficult as you want it to be. We would always encourage you to keep the website as simple as your business needs/website goals would allow it to be. Spend more time on the essential website content and information rather overly complex website technology. Do not add a website feature unless there is a real pressing need for it. Normally, allow the need to come first and the feature second. If you create the feature first you may have a hard time generating the need for the feature. Also spend some time observing what other successful websites have done. Hopefully this article will provide you with some tools, techniques and most importantly the confidence you need to start building your website. While we have mentioned many of the technical aspects of web building, do not forget your primary reason for building your website: To serve Allah(swt). So strive strongly to adhere to the Quran and Sunnah. Inshallah, if you build it seeking the pleasure of Allah(swt) alone, Allah(swt) will help and reward you in your endeavor.

 

Note 1: Once you have built your website, do not forget to back it up on some disks or your home computer. After all, if the host provider has technical problems you don’t want to lose all your work.

Note 2: Please use your common sense. Do not put confidential information like your personal tax returns on the internet/your website, etc. As a practical (as opposed to ideal matter), most internet security can be circumvented, and the internet is notorious for its lack of privacy—although attempts are being made to improve things.

Note 3: It goes without saying that for some people your website might be their first and only contact with Islam. So be responsible and professional in accurately presenting our beautiful religion to such a large audience.

Further Reading: Notwithstanding the above, some of you may have an important reason to learn web programming. Here are some possible leads/resources. (1) "Server-Side Scripting Shootout" (Nov 1999) compares the different competing web programming standards at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/index.html. (Estimated market shares on April 29, 2004: php: 40%, asp: 30%, perl: 18%, cold fusion 6%, jsp (e.g.java) 6%. ( click for methodology .) It is likely that asp.net market share will rise further in the future.). To find market shares of different webservers try www.netcraft.com. Linux/Apache/perlphp/mysql is a very popular inexpensive combination. Asp is also popular -- is available on both windows and linux hosting solutions. (2) Kevin Yank's "Build your own database driven website using PHP & Mysql provides a very quick introduction to php. CGI Programming 101 by Jacqueline D. Hamilton is an excellent introductory perl book along with the associated website www.cgi101.com . After reading that one can also check out http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/Tutorials/perl.html (e.g. "On the fly html and web templates in "The perl you need to know") for more advanced stuff. The cgi programming 201 book shows how to actually build a message board using perl/mysql.

Another path involves the use of freelance programmer talent. See www.guru.com, rentacoder.com, http://www.elance.com, www.getafreelancer.com, etc. Other possibilities include scriptlance and php-freelancer.. (Search on www.google.com or www.a9.com (click on site info button) for others). If you use freelancers you may need a signed contract to check/control the code copyright -- see a lawyer and also check out www.nolopress.com.) You may also seek a security audit through someone like http://www.hardened-php.net/ if you are working on ecommerce projects, for example. Excercise care when dealing with code gives access to financial information -- at the minimal it should be independently reviewed. Think through any security/privacy issues too. Also talk to your accountant and check out www.paycycle.com.


The sequel to this article is www.islamicwell.com/nrobdir/buildingwebsites2.htm .

Disclaimer: This article is not a substitute from your own independent due diligence and research and discussions with appropriate authorities. For example, it does not provide legal advice (of course do not do anything illegal), so check local, state, federal, international laws, download/activation/registration terms, etc. to make sure you are in compliance.

Article printed in www.islamicwell.com
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