Free homepages are a big business. Geocities, the server hosting the Alice Drive Middle School Home Page, hosts millions of websites and there are any number of other servers out there offering the same type of free service.

In choosing a server for your home page, you may decide on your own internet service provider or you may choose to use one of the commercial servers offering up to 11 mb of web space, free. Most of the free homepage providers require advertisments in return for their services, so remember that you may have to put a banner or a link on your page in order to get the free space these places offer. Some of the advertisement are popups that are very annoying to visitors to your page so it's best to visit a few home pages on the site before you decide. You will also need to find out how you will transfer files to their server. Some of the free servers offer online browser uploading where you do not need an FTP software program. Others offer both browswer upload and FTP, while others offer only FTP transfer. It is not difficult to use an FTP program and it is much faster than using your browser to upload. If you have Netscape Communicator, the Composer portion of the program will work as a file transfer protocal program (FTP).

Note: Remember that although the service is free to you, the price that has paid is in advertising. It's rather like commercial television. You or your visitors see the advertisements that commercial entities have purchased. An advertiser has acutally paid for your server space.

Check out some of the free servers above and decide where you would like to have your home page reside on the World Wide Web. Remember, if you don't have an FTP program, many of the servers offer browser file transfer. Good luck with getting your own web site started. If you have any questions, I am only an e-mail away. Let me know when you get your site up and running so that a link can be provided from the Alice Drive Middle School site.

Note: Once you have completed these lessons, you have gotten off to a good start, but you have only covered the tip of the HTML iceburg here. There are many more tags and codes that it would take a 400 or more page book to cover. I suggest that you check an HTML book out of the library. When I first became interested in doing Web pages, I taught myself HTML by borrowing a book on HTML from the Sumter County Library. I later purchased my own books and once I knew how to do the coding by hand, I obtained some HTML software programs. I usually use Claris Home Page and the Composer part of my Netscape Communicator program to create my pages now. These lesson pages were created partially by hand coding but for the most part with Claris Home Page.