Preliminary Preparation

This gives a basic description on how to construct web pages off-line, and to maintain off-line backups of all pages you have created, regardless of the means used to make the them. 

Before You Start Your First Page

The First step

Create a directory on your hard drive to store all of your pages and images that you intend to use on your site.
For example - C:\AA My HomePage\ as in the image at right.
Into this, you will save all your '.html' files that you create, and any images you wish to put up on your page. This enables you to work on your page, without wasting valuable Net time.

This is Why!

Well, if the unthinkable happens and the GeoCities server crashes, they will have to reload using a backup, which is not necessarily recent, and any changes you made after that backup was taken, will be lost.
Or, your neighbourhood becomes inaccessible for a period of time, due to system maintenance, you can edit / create your pages off line on your hard drive, then simply upload (or FTP) the lot when everything is back to normal.
You should do this to prevent the loss of all the blood, sweat and possibly tears you have put into creating your site.

How do I edit my page off-line?

To create / edit your page off-line, you can use any text editor, like notepad, wordpad, MS Works or any other text writing program, even the Editor in Netscape.
Once you have created / edited your page, save it with the .html extension eg index.html as seen in the image above.
The html extension may not be in the drop-down list supplied with the program you use. Simply select "All Files" from the drop-down in the save as dialog box, and type the extension in after the filename.

What if I have already made a page using the geocities facilities, or have edited my page on-line?

All you need do is browse to your on-line page, then save it (save as or save file as in the file menu), in the same directory that you have set up for off-line editing.

What about looking at my page off line, how can I see it to test it?

Now this one is easy to answer. All you do is to use the File menu of your browser, select Open... (msie) or Open file in Browser (netscape), move to the directory that you created earlier on your computer, select the file (with .html or .htm extension) that you wish to view, and open it. Ta-Dah.
If you have just edited a page , browse to it, or if your browser is aready there, click on Refresh/Reload on your browser to see the altered page.

 Are there any basic rules I need to know?

Yes. Firstly, the first page MUST be called index or you will not have a front door to your site, and should use the .html extension.
Secondly, keep all page and link names in lower case. This makes it easier to prevent mistakes when setting links.
(If you wish, you could also rename your images in lower case on your computer, prior to uploading)
Thirdly, you should put the link back to Geocities on all of your pages to keep our host happy.

A note on html

htm and html are equivalent when viewed with browsers.
(html = hypertext markup language).
However, geocities use the html extension, so if they need to reference your page (lets say you have won an award), they will be looking for the index.html file.
If your index file currently has the htm extension, and you needed to rename your file so geocities can reference it, (from index.htm to index.html), then, any links you previously set on your other pages will still be looking for index.htm and so will not work.
It is advised that you to start using the html extension now

The On-line / Off-line HTML Guide...

 If you decide to use this html guide, offline, you will need to save the following three images in the SAME directory that you save the guide, so that they appear on the guide when you are using it.
And and this as well .

Now to start your first page, here is the On-line / Off-line HTML Guide

OR, you could download this zip file, which has this page, the guide, and all the images required, inside.