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Review - Creating A Music Website To accompany our series on creating your own web pages, we're looking at a book which aims to help you create a music web site - Book Review by Ian Waugh
It doesn't concentrate just on that one subject, though. The first half of the book leads you through the process of designing and creating a web site which could be for any purpose. It covers basic beginner questions such as “What is the Internet?”, “What's a browser?” and “What is a URL?” Although the book mentions authoring software (and gives a good plug to Dreamweaver), all the practical examples are given in HTML, for which the author invites your thanks! The point is, although you can design and construct a site with an authoring program, a smattering of HTML will certainly be useful at various stages of the process and near-essential when you want to customise a section.
There is a considerable chapter on tables and frames. However, not all users like frames (and they need to be programmed carefully), not all browsers support them, and they seem to have gone out of fashion with better designs and layouts offering better functionality. Having got your basic site up and running, we get to the music bits. There are more things to take into consideration when putting music on a web site than graphics. Audio files can be enormous so you must have a plan of action. Downloads If you want to give visitors the option of downloading music - or perhaps even buying it - it will help if they can hear an extract first. The best way of doing this is to use streaming which means the music starts playing as soon as the data arrives at the visitor's computer rather than them having to wait until an entire music file has been downloaded. Most music sites use this "instant preview" method and if visitors like what they hear they can click on another link to download the entire file. File options include MP3, RealAudio (the author's favourite and widely used by many music sites) and QuickTime. The book covers players and encoders, and the encoding process for all three formats. There are sections on getting the file onto your site, embedding files and even adding a video clip. The book rounds off with other useful topics such as putting your music files on the Server with FTP, registering your site with search engines, using META tags (you'll be glad you have a smattering of HTML) and site maintenance. It concludes with a chapter on Selling on the Net and one on Domain names. Verdict Creating A Music Website covers a lot of ground and at a modest 106 pages it can't do it all in any depth. A beginner could, with a little judicious help (including that offered by our Web Guides) use this book to put together a web site. However, there are other books and sources (on the Net itself) that cover this subject in more detail. The book's main value is its coverage of music and if you're a bit vague about the workings of music and the Internet then it is well worth consulting in order to view your options and to learn how to implement them.
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From
basic design and layout considerations, the book covers graphics
(paying particular attention to their size), adding links, anchors
and thumbnails.