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by Tim Parker
In this section of the book we’ve seen how to set up Linux to act as an Internet server, offering FTP, Gopher, WAIS, and World Wide Web services to the world. In the previous section you saw how to add mail and news to your system, too. Most people who do connect to the Internet want to use the World Wide Web, either for connecting to other sites or to make their own site available.
The Web has grown enormously in the last couple of years, inspiring many people to publish their own Web pages featuring subjects they are passionate about. One of the most common problems these Web sites run into, though, is the lack of design of a decent set of home pages and poor response from the server. In this chapter we take a brief look at some of the essentials you need to consider when you set up your own Web site using Linux. There are entire books dedicated to the proper design of Web pages, so we can only briefly look at the subject here.
It doesn’t matter whether you are setting up a Web page to trumpet your own achievements in setting up Linux, or whether you are paying homage to your favorite TV show. Every Web page that is to receive visitors should follow a few simple rules for system response and page layout.
One of the most annoying aspects of using the Web is the interminable wait for some Web pages to load (or even worse, the dreaded message that the Web page can’t be found!). If anything is going to discourage visitors from your site, it’s waiting too long to see your home page contents. There are really two issues here: system availability and system response.
System availability is when your Web pages are available to the Internet. If you turn off your Web server machine when you are not using it, then no one will be able to access it. Anyone trying to get to your page through a search utility or directly through the URL will get the dreaded “URL not found” messages. Most users will promptly eliminate your Web site from their bookmark list, never to visit again.
The solution is simple: Keep your Web server running 24 hours a day, except when you have to take it down (briefly) for maintenance. You may not expect anyone to visit you at 4:00 a.m., but remember that the Web is worldwide and to someone many time zones away, it’s early evening. A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) will help keep your server from cycling every time the power fails or varies more than your hardware’s tolerance, and is a worthwhile investment.
System response really depends on two things: your machine’s speed and your connection speed to the Web. If you are using a 1200 baud modem, then it doesn’t matter how fast your hardware is—traffic to your site will be crippled by the slow download speed. That doesn’t mean you have to have a dedicated ISDN or T1 line to your server. A normal asynchronous modem running at 28.8 kbps or faster is fine for most lightly used Web sites. If you start to get a lot of visitors and response gets slow, you’ll have to invest in faster connections, but most Web sites are very low traffic anyway.
If your connection to the Internet is fast enough, chances are unlikely that your hardware will be the limiting factor. An 80486 can serve information to a standard modem much faster than the modem can transfer it, so it really doesn’t matter whether you use a Pentium or not. At least not until you have a very popular site, in which case you need faster everything!
One of the biggest mistakes made by people setting up their first Web server is to get too complicated. You’ve written some really snazzy animations in Java that you want to share with the world on your Web page, and that’s fine, but remember that everyone who accesses your page has to download all that code. That takes time, especially over async modems. You’ve designed a wonderful home page with purple lettering on a green background. It looks fine on your system, but not everyone will get the same color renditions. All they will see is a muddy color with unreadable text. All these issues are important to consider when designing a Web page. The basic rule is: Keep it simple!
One of the most important aspects of designing your Web page is making sure whatever you are trying to convey is clear and easily understood. If you are setting up a site for your company, the company’s name and purpose should be clearly understood with a quick glance at the home page. Remember that most people read from top to bottom, so important things should be toward the top of the screen. The same principle applies with advertising and newspapers: headlines and important information is right at the top where the publishers hope to catch your attention and draw you into reading the entire item. Most readers start at the top and only read down until they get distracted by something, so a clean uncluttered page design will get the reader to see all your home page.
A good example of a page design for maximum readability is if you have some Linux software you want to make available to other users. If you put the link to the software at the bottom of the page, many readers will miss it, especially if they have to scroll. Although a lot of home pages are long, not many readers bother to scroll all the way through. For this reason it’s often a good idea to keep the amount of scrolling to a minimum by designing short Web pages, ideally with no scrolling required at all. Putting the demo software links at the top of the page makes them much more likely to get clicked on than something that requires scrolling or sorting through many icons at the bottom of the page.
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