Get your own Free Home PageWeb page design is 99% preparation and only 1% perspiration. That's why this is such an important section. The first thing you want to do is ask yourself these questions. Who? What? Where? Why? When? and How? These are very important questions and will determine the success of your page. This can be true of personal and commercial pages alike.
Do you want to have a page for a particular age group? Or do you want it to be enjoyed by everyone? What about appealing to people of certain interests. A site that appeals to the greatest number of people will get the most traffic.
1. Commercial or personal? A commercial page advertises a product or service, while a personal page may just provide information and links. You may even want to have a combination of the two. You may find that different web servers will require you to pay for a commercial page while giving personal pages free of charge. These free pages must contain no advertisement of any kind. It's up to you.
2. Do you want several different themes or one that applies to the whole site? If you're advertising a product or service you supply, you might consider having the site based only on that product. That way you can be sure to provide thorough information to your clients. Personal pages, on the other hand, my have a variety of themes based on what the creator is interested in. Themes may include hobbies, pets, family, etc. You can even post original material such as poems, stories, photographs, and some of your "masterpieces" you have created.
Once you have your page planned out, you'll need a server to house your page so it can be seen. If your page is personal, there are many organizations that will house your page for free. Provided that you have no advertising whatsoever. The best personal web-server on the net is Geocities . They will provide you with a 2 megs of web page that you can put anything you want on it. If you want a commercial website, the price range from $29 dollars a month for five megs to $95 a month for 25 megs, so of course shop around. If, however, you don't need a commercial space with all the fancy stuff and the huge allotment of disk space, Geocities has a great program going for commercial sites. It's not as expensive or as feature packed as servers, but it's great for small and home businesses just getting a start.
Is it to just have a home page or is it to sell a product. Either way, make that clear. Get the point across to your viewers. If they don't know what the page is about, they won't come back.
Set a realistic date and try to keep it. If you have posted a date and you can't live up to it, let everyone know why. We understand that things happen from time to time.
Maybe you've seen a page and thought, "That looks like a good layout. I want my page to look like that" or maybe "Those graphics are neat. I want some like those on my page". A good start would be to maybe save that page and look at it's source to find out how they got the effect you're after. Remember, don't actually use the page or its content because it is copyrighted. Also if the images you like are free, and the page says so, you may copy the image for your own use. Most sites offer free images in exchange for you telling other people where you got the images. Try building an archive of pages and images for use in designing your page even before you begin work. Always remember, if you create it-you own it. If they create it-they own it. So you got to ask.
Now that you have answered those questions, you might try sketching the general layout of the page on some paper. This can help you when you are actually writing your page. It'll also help you better answer the questions above.
Now that planning and design is taken care of, you can now begin to start construction with an HTML editor.
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