Tharanga Magazine 2017 tharanga 2017 | Page 17

THARANGA 2017 Today a website is an essential thing for research, as a blog for creative ideas, for business or to our organizations. It is pretty useful to know how to make a website on our own. SLSAJ also maintains its website (slsaj.com) on their own. If you get a quotation from a company to design a website for you it will cost more than 50,000 yen, so why we don't try ourselves? basic steps. 1) To maintain a website, we need to get a domain name (like slsaj.com). (.com .org etc.) You can find domain providers easily on the web. When deciding a domain name, we need to consider an extension such as .com (for commercial) .org (for organization) .info etc. or with country codes like .jp .lk etc. Even though these extensions are not strictly reserved for those categories, it is better to get a matching extension. There are very cheap extensions as well .fun . xyz etc. (e.g. : l websites. 2) To host (to serve) our website, we need a server (a computer). Storage (1GB, 10GB etc) Here we need to consider how much storage (hard disk space) we need. If you have several thousands of hits in a month, then you need to consider about CPU and RAM of the server too. It is cheap to rent a server from a hosting company then we personally maintain our own server. 3) Content! Website is a piece of a text file, there are no colors or designs like what we see on the screen. But we need to define them separately by codes (HTML for the content, CSS for styles). Following code and the figure are a self-explanatory example. However, you do not need to worry about the codes. You can use the free templates provided by WordPress J (SLSAJ website use WordPress). These tools provide a user interface so you just have to update the website like in Facebook in fact even you can post to the website using email or sending a FB message. Most hosting providers provide easy one click installation for these tools. Panduka Neluwala The Universtiy of Tokyo Page 12 SRI LANKAN STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION IN JAPAN