Chapter 17

Making a Splash Online

In This Chapter

Putting material on the web

Showing off your family photos online

Posting documents and calendars online for viewing and editing by other people

Making your own website from scratch

Creating an online store or just selling random stuff

Back at the dawn of the World Wide Web (in 1989), the plan was that people all over the world would communicate among themselves — a virtual rustic global village. That isn’t exactly how it turned out, with giant megamalls like Amazon.com making the web a distinctly nonrustic experience. But after you’ve browsed the web for a while, you’ll probably think of putting your own material online. Hey, you’ve got interesting things to say, probably more interesting than a lot of websites you’ve surfed past!

Yes, it’s time to stop just browsing the web and start putting yourself out there in various ways. This chapter walks you through a bunch of ways to post information on the web and explains how to start with ones that are easy.

Ways to Go Public on the Web

You can post information on the Internet in lots of different ways. Some require more start-up effort than others. Here’s an overview of the best methods for putting your own information online:

• Join a social network: Websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace started as glorified personal ads and have expanded to include photos, video, email, blogs, polls — you name it. See Chapter 10.
• Create photo galleries: Many sites enable you to create an online gallery of photos or other pictures. Make your gallery public or share it with only friends and family. See the later section “Say ‘Cheese!’”
• Share videos: If you have home videos, animated movies, or other digital video you created or edited using software on your PC or Mac, you can post it on a number of video sites. See Chapter 14.
• Share documents, spreadsheets, and calendars: Post word processing documents or spreadsheets that select personnel can view or edit, and create calendars that others can see and change. See the section “Sharing Documents and Calendars,” later in this chapter.
• Write a weblog (blog): Create an online diary or journal with chronological entries. Chapter 18 describes how to read blogs and write your own blog.
• Use Twitter to let your friends know what you’re up to: Twitter is a little, tiny blog where you post short messages (tweets) and read other people’s messages. See Chapter 11.
• Build a handcrafted website: You can use Google Sites, Homestead, Weebly, or a web page editor to create a website with pages of your choosing. See the section “Making Your Own Website,” later in this chapter, to find out how.
• Sell stuff: Sell goods or services in an online storefront or auction. See the section “Setting Up an Online Shop,” at the end of this chapter.

Say “Cheese!”

We love sharing our family photos with other people, and the web makes it easy. Also, sharing over the web saves you the cost of making extra prints of your snapshots, and it’s quick. Several websites enable you to upload your digital pictures to the sites and share the pictures with your friends and family. These free photo-sharing sites make their money by selling prints — after your family sees that gorgeous shot of little Daisy finger-painting with pudding, they’ll have to have a copy for the fridge!

Of course, the most popular way to share pictures is on Facebook.

You can try one of these photo-sharing sites:

• Flickr (part of Yahoo!) at flickr.com is probably the biggest photo-sharing site. Upload pictures from your computer, email them, or send them from your phone — videos, too. Flickr gives you the choice of making photos public to all Flickr users, accessible only to specific groups of people, or completely private.
• Picasa (from Google) at picasa.google.com combines a free photo-organizing program with a web-based picture-sharing site and photo editing tools, at picasaweb.google.com.
• Photobucket (owned by Fox) at photobucket.com hosts both pictures and video.
• Snapfish at www.snapfish.com lets you set up online photo albums using either photos you upload or rolls of film you mail in to the site. You can share the albums and order prints.

After you create an account at one of these sites, you can upload photos into online photo albums by filling out forms on the website. Then you can share your albums with your friends. If you want, you can make your photos on these sites invisible to the general public — only to the people with whom you share the album.

You (and your friends) can also order prints of your uploaded photos — that’s how these sites make their money. The prices for prints are reasonable, and we find these systems convenient. You can print your photos as calendars, cards, books, and even postage stamps.

Another way to share photos is to include them on a blog, as described in Chapter 18. Blogs are useful if you want to use your photos to illustrate a narrative, such as the story of your trip to Spain. Tumblr at www.tumblr.com is nominally a blog site, but many people use it to host photos and video.

Organizing Your Photos, Too

Several programs help you organize the pictures on your computer as well as upload and share them online. Picasa is the Google photo management program, which you can download from www.picasa.com or picasa.google.com. The program finds the photos on your computer (identifying them by their filename extensions) and helps you organize, caption, and edit them. You can then upload the photos or albums to the website for sharing with your friends and family. Figure 17-1 shows the Picasa photo sharing website.

Sharing Documents and Calendars

Have you ever wished that you could share a spreadsheet or word processing document with other people, and maybe even let them make changes? Suppose that you’re the commissioner of a fantasy football league and you want to share a spreadsheet of players and their statistics with the other players. Yeah, you can email a spreadsheet to everyone, but what if you make updates? Instead, you can upload the spreadsheet to a document-sharing site and share it with the other players.

Or, a document or spreadsheet might be just for you, but you may need to be able to edit it from more than one computer. Our kids use a document sharing site to work on their school papers both at home and at school — it’s much easier than copying their files to a thumb drive or disk, which they’d probably forget on the kitchen counter, right next to their lunch.

Document sharing sites let you use the web as your word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation program, storing your files online. You can see, edit, and print your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any computer that’s on the Internet. In fact, these sites are so good that some people use them for all their documents and spreadsheets, even if they have word processing and spreadsheet programs on their computers.

Creating a Google document

The most popular document sharing site is Google Drive, at drive.google.com. Its applications, called Docs (word processor), Sheets (spreadsheet), and Slides (presentations) don’t support every advanced feature of Microsoft Word and Excel and Powerpoint, but they handle all the basics. Figure 17-2 shows a Google Docs word processing document. The toolbar just above the document provides formatting options, much like a “real” word processor, and the menu bar (File, Edit, View, and so on) provides other features. You can print your spreadsheet, presentation, or document or export it to your computer as a normal document file that office programs such as Microsoft Office or the freeware LibreOffice can handle.

To get started with Google Drive, follow these steps:

1. Sign in at drive.google.com with your Google account username and password.

   Or, if you’re already signed in at another Google site, click Drive on the list of Google services at the top of the screen. Either way, you see the Google Drive screen, with a list of the files you can view or edit.

2. To upload a word processing document, presentation, or spreadsheet from your computer, click Upload, click Browse, and select the file or folder to import. Then click Upload File.

   Google Drive uploads the file and creates a new document, presentation, or spreadsheet you can edit and share.

3. To create a new document, presentation, or spreadsheet from scratch (rather than upload it), click Create and choose the kind of file you want to create.

   Hey, the Create menu has a bunch of other options, too (maybe more since we wrote this chapter), such as Drawing, which is a simple paint program.

   Google creates a new file of the type you chose and displays it on the screen, with the appropriate menu bar and icons for editing.

4. If you created the file from scratch, give it a name. Click on the default name which will be something like “Untitled document” and type a better name.
5. Type information in the document, presentation, or spreadsheet as usual.

   If you made a spreadsheet, click in a cell and then type in it. To edit a cell, double-click it or click it and press F2.

6. Google Drive automatically saves what you type, usually within a few seconds.

   Google saves your data in the cloud — in one of the innumerable web servers that Google maintains and that you never have to see or worry about. Your changes are saved as you edit, so you’re unlikely to lose your work.

Google has Drive, Docs, and Sheets apps for Windows, Mac, and most mobile devices. The Drive app for Windows and Mac make your Drive folders appear to be on your computer. The ones for mobile devices have an app for Drive, and separate apps for Docs, Sheets, and Slides so you can view and (with some difficulty) edit files on your device.

Sharing the wealth

After you have a document or spreadsheet or presentation in Google Drive, you can share it with other people. Choose File⇒Share and cut-and-paste or type email addresses into the People box. Click Can Edit if you want to allow them to make changes to your document or spreadsheet, or Can Comment to let them add comments, or Can View if they can look but not touch. Enter the text of the email message that Google Drive will send to invite them to look at your document or spreadsheet, and click Share.

Your invitees receive a message explaining how to access the information you’re sharing.

You can also give people a web address they can use to view the document or spreadsheet (no editing). Click Share, click Get Sharable Link, and choose whether the link lets people Edit, Comment, or View. You’ll see a rather long URL that you can email or IM to people so that they can take a look.

Making and sharing an online calendar

A handy kind of information you can share is an online calendar. Maybe your club, church, theater, or another organization holds public events. Or, maybe it has a schedule of meetings to share with a small group of people. Either way, you can make an online calendar, enter events or meetings on it, and make it available for viewing or editing.

Google Calendars, at www.google.com/calendar, enables you to make one or more calendars, share them with other people, and make them public. You can display more than one calendar, overlaid in different colors, so that you can see your own events alongside your friends’ or co-workers’ events. Microsoft has a similar service at calendar.live.com.

Margy’s family has a Google calendar for tracking family events. On the computer in her kitchen, family members refer to the online calendar rather than to the traditional, coffee-stained, paper wall calendar. They sync their family Google calendar with the calendars on their smartphones or other devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and Android phone. (Okay, we are geeks, but having a shared family calendar with us all the time sure is convenient! John, on the other hand, thinks that a Google calendar is no substitute for a paper calendar with pictures of Japanese anime cartoons.)

Looking beyond Google Docs

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has decided to play this game, too. If you go to Microsoft Office Online, at products.office.com/en-us/office-online, you can create (surprise!) documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, saved in your OneDrive account. To get started, sign in with your Windows Live account, such as your Hotmail account (or make one for free).

Microsoft also offers Office 365, which is a subscription version of their desktop office software suite. For $100/year, you can run Office on up to five PCs and Macs, and up to five mobile devices. Files can be stored either on the computer or in the cloud. If you have a bunch of PCs, the pricing is often cheaper than buying software separately for each.

Plain Old Files in the Cloud

Sometimes you don’t want all the help that Google Drive offers, editing and reformatting files, you just want to stash files somewhere that lets you and perhaps your friends download them, exactly as you uploaded them, with less hassle than trying to mail everything around as attachments. We use cloud storage for collections of full resolution photos from a camera, and audio recordings we’ve made of events. The most popular service is Dropbox. To store or share files in Dropbox, follow these steps:

1. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, create one.

   Visit www.dropbox.com, click Sign Up, and create an account. Choose the free basic account which is plenty for most people; you can always upgrade to a paid account if it turns out you need more space.

2. Log in at www.dropbox.com if you aren’t logged in already.
3. Upload files to your Dropbox account.

   Usually you can just drag files into the Dropbox browser window, and they’ll upload automatically. Failing that, click the Upload icon (a rectangle with a small plus sign) to get an upload menu. Uploading large files can take a while, so look at the progress meter at the bottom of the screen to see what’s going on.

4. To download files, log into your Dropbox account from the computer where you want to download them, and click on the files you want.

   They download to your computer.

5. To share a file or folder with someone else, mouse over the file and click the little Share icon that appears.

   The first time you do this, they’ll ask you to confirm your email address by clicking in a link they send you. Once you’ve done that, they show you a URL you can copy and paste into email or instant messages, or they offer to send mail for you. When the recipient clicks on the URL, they see your Dropbox file or folder, which they can download.

Dropbox has a lot of other useful features. Most notably, they have downloadable applications for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android and Apple mobile devices that make the Dropbox folders appear as folders on your computer or device. If you use Dropbox very much, it’s worth installing and using these.

Although Dropbox is the most popular cloud storage provider, there are plenty of others:

• Microsoft OneDrive (https://onedrive.live.com) provides upload and download features similar to Dropbox, and is also integrated with Office, so you can use OneDrive files directly from Office programs.
• Amazon CloudDrive (https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/) provides similar features to Dropbox, with free storage of photos.

It’s important to keep backups of your files, and Dropbox or another cloud storage service can keep backup copies in the event of a hard disk failure, power surge, fire, or flood.

Making Your Own Website

At the beginning of this chapter, we list a bunch of ways you can put information on the web. These ways are terrific, just terrific — we love them all — but they may not be enough for you. What if you want more? What if you need a website with a bunch of pages, with titles you choose, about topics you choose, and maybe even with your own domain name? Okay, you’re ready for the next step.

Page creators abound

You have (as usual) several ways to create a website, beyond using Facebook, photo sharing sites, and blogs. The simplest is to use a page creator site. At these sites, you can design the look of your site, create a home page for the site, and create as many other pages as you want. Different pages can have different layouts. You don’t have to learn to use HTML, the formatting language used by all web pages; see the later sidebar “Why you don’t care (much) about HTML.”

Page creator sites offer a variety of features, so look carefully before choosing one:

• Cost: The site may be free or may incur a monthly charge. Free sites often display ads over which you have little control.
• Customization: Some page creator sites allow more customization of the design than others. Some let you see the HTML (web page code) that makes up your pages and tweak it so that your pages look just right. Others don’t allow it.
• Subdomain: Your site can be a subdomain of the page creator site, where your web address is the main site’s address with www replaced by a name you choose. You might want your website to have its own domain name (that web address ending in .com or whatever) to give it a little extra cachet. You can find more information about best practices regarding domain names and the various technical details of acquiring one in Building Websites All-in-One For Dummies, by David Karlins and Doug Sahlin (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).
• Design: Page creator sites offer lots of standard designs. See whether any sites have a design you like.
• Special features: Some sites let you include message boards, guest books, blogs, calendars, photo galleries, and video on your site. Some help you sell items on your site, with connections to PayPal for checkout.
• Size: The amount of information you can store on your website varies, along with the maximum number of pages.

Here are some page creator sites we know about:

• Google Sites, at sites.google.com, is a free page creator site run by (who else?) Google. It isn’t hugely flexible, but it’s easy to use.
• Homestead, at www.homestead.com, is for small businesses and lets you start from more than 2,000 business templates.
• Jigsy, at www.jigsy.com, is free for one small, personal website, but charges a modest fee for a larger or commercial site. You can include Twitter messages, Google maps, and other fancy components on your pages.
• uCoz, at www.ucoz.com, hosts websites for free and lets you include photos, videos, photo albums, polls, guest books, and forms that email you the information that people fill in. It’s one of the most popular sites in Russia.
• Weebly, at www.weebly.com, has a nice drag-and-drop system for setting up your site — and no ads.
• Webs, at www.webs.com, has lots of design templates and can host photos, videos, blogs, and message forums.
• Yola, at www.yola.com, is another well-regarded page creator site.

All these sites make creating your own website incredibly easy — for free. You can add pages, add text and pictures to the pages, and create links in the text. Most page creator sites provide a bunch of other items you can add to your pages, such as a calendar, a weather report, a Google map, a blog, an MP3 music player, and videos. For example, you can include a map to your church’s or club’s meeting location.

What do you say?

Creating a web page is easy. Choosing what to put on your page, however, is harder. What is the page for? What kind of person do you want to see it? Is it for you and your family and friends and potential friends across the world, or are you advertising your business online?

Consider which information you want the entire world to know, because a website is potentially visible to absolutely anyone, including that guy who has hated you ever since fifth grade. If your page is a personal page, don’t include your home address or phone number unless you want random people who see the page potentially calling you up. If it’s a business page, include your address, phone number, and any other information that potential customers might want.

Setting Up an Online Shop

Selling stuff on the Internet used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of software and programming talent. A number of sites now let you create web stores for modest fees. Here are a few:

• Amazon.com Marketplace, at sellercentral.amazon.com, is easy to set up. Sign in with an Amazon.com account (the same account you use if you buy books or other items on the site), click Your Account, and click Your Seller Account to find out how to set up a seller account. Or, search Amazon.com for the item you want to sell and click the Sell Yours Here button. The site even processes credit card sales for you, eliminating what was once a horrible pain in the neck.
• eBay.com Stores, at pages.ebay.com/sellerinformation, enables you to sell items in auctions (for which eBay is famous) or at fixed prices (using the Buy It Now option). Your store can have its own name and logo, and items in your store show up when people search eBay for merchandise.
• Craigslist, at www.craiglist.com, is a huge online local classified ads site. You can list almost anything for sale. The site has separate sections for every major city and every U.S. state and they strongly encourage people to meet in person for the transaction; if your browser displays the wrong site, click links in the righthand column to find the site for your area.
• Etsy, at www.etsy.com, lets you sell crafts, including clothing, jewelry, ceramics, and anything else you can make by hand.
• Yahoo, at smallbusiness.yahoo.com, lets you create a storefront for a monthly fee.

To set up a store, you sign up for a free account at the website and then click the link to create the store. You provide information about the items you sell, including descriptions, prices, and shipping costs. On eBay, you’re usually paid by PayPal; on Craigslist, buyer and seller usually meet in person and pay in cash or with a local check; for everyone else, the site typically accepts credit cards and deposits your share to your own bank account.

If you don’t want to set up a whole store, you can still sell individual items either on consignment at sites such as www.half.com or at auction at sites such as www.ebay.com. eBay owns Half.com, so when you set up an account to buy or sell items on one, you’re ready to buy or sell on the other, too.

To sell an item on Half.com (or any other consignment site), first find the item you want to sell. Half specializes in books, movies, and music, and it has almost everything in print in its database. When you find your item, click the Sell My Copy link, specify the condition of the item, add a description, and state your asking price. When you click the List Item link, your listing goes into the Half.com database and appears on the site within an hour. When you sell your item — which can be minutes, hours, or months later — Half.com keeps a commission.

Selling an item on eBay is similar for books, CDs, and DVDs, but for other items it can be a little more complicated. You write a description for the item and take or scan a digital picture of it. Start at www.ebay.com, click the Sell tab or link, and follow the directions. Auctions can last as long as seven days, or you can set up a fixed-price offer with no end date. eBay charges you a listing fee, although if your item doesn’t sell, you can usually relist it (try again, perhaps with a lower starting price) for free. Click Customer Support in the upper-right corner of any eBay page, and then click Selling & Seller Fees for instructions and hints for selling.

Search completed eBay listings to get ideas for effective titles and descriptions, along with prices at which similar items have sold. And be sure to include a good photo of the item. For most of these sites, you need a PayPal account (described in Chapter 16) to accept payments.