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GETTING STARTED
There's a right way and a wrong way to do most everything, and so it is with web pages. The wrong way can make your page-building experience your worst nightmare, and then some. The right way will help you avoid costly mistakes and make your web page building a fun and rewarding experience. All it takes is a common-sense approach and a lot of patience.
THE MOVING IN PROCEDURE, NOT YET A MEMBER

  1. On GeoCities home page, find "Welcome Guest" and click on Sign in
  2. On the Sign In page, find I'm a New User and click on Sign Me Up
  3. Fill in the Sign-up page information
  4. Click on the Submit button
  5. On the next page that opens, Find a suitable neighborhood and click on it
  6. A page will open with your new homepage address; print out this page
  7. On the same page, find Build Your Page Now!; click on i
  8. On the page that opens, click on Build a Page
  9. Under Beginners click on the Start GeoBuilder button
  10. A new page opens in GeoBuilder; build your page
  11. Save the page as index.htm
  12. A prompt may appear saying "You already have a page named index.html. Are you sure you want to replace it?" Click Ye
  13. Select File Manager from the GeoBuilder File menu; enter the File Manager
  14. Locate your index.html file and click on View to the right of the file to see your new page

THE MOVING IN PROCEDURE, ALREADY A MEMBER

  1. On GeoCities home page, find "Welcome Guest" and click on Sign in
  2. On the Sign In page, sign in at the appropriate area
  3. Select Build a Page
  4. Under Beginners click on the Start GeoBuilder button
  5. A new page opens in GeoBuilder; build your page
  6. Save the page as index.html
  7. A prompt may appear saying "You already have a page named index.html. Are you sure you want to replace it?" Click Yes
  8. Select File Manager from the GeoBuilder File menu; enter the File Manager
  9. Locate your index.html file and click on View to the right of the file to see your new page

THE CONTENT GUIDELINES

Creating a GeoCities web site without reading the content guidelines is like building a house without a building permit. There are some things you can't put on your GeoCities pages, and wouldn't it be a sad thing to have to remove your page or site from the net because you broke some rules?

CONTENT GUIDELINES:
http://www.oocities.org/members/guidelines/guideline.html


BE PREPARED

You'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration later if you prepare yourself before entering GeoBuilder.

I recommend you read through this stuff in the order given here:

  • GeoBuilder Overview
  • Introduction
  • Section I
  • Section II
  • Section III
  • Section V
  • Section V
  • Section VI

MAKE PRINTOUTS

Print out a copy of all the tutorial pages and anything else you think you might find useful while you're building your pages, and put these printouts in a binder, nice and neat. It isn't much fun shuffling through stacks of paper trying to find that certain one you need RIGHT NOW.

PRINTING TIP:
If you don't want to print the graphics and colors on a page (it really sucks up the printer cartridge) go to Edit, Select All, then Copy and then Paste the page into Notepad. Only the text will show up and you can edit out all the stuff you don't want. When you have the file cleaned up, save it in your Web Page folder in a subfolder named Tutorials.


COLLECT SOME COOL STUFF TO PUT ON YOUR PAGES

You'll find tons of sites on the net that have free stuff: graphics, fonts, backgrounds, and the like. I have some listed on my links page, GeoCities has a list of links, just about every site you visit has some links to graphics sites. Or just go to your favorite search engine and do a word-match search for "free web graphics", "free gifs", etc.

Create a folder in your computer named Web Page, then inside this folder create some subfolders with names like Graphics, Bars, Buttons, Dividers, and so on. Put the goodies and graphics you collect for your page in these folders.

Instructions for collecting and saving graphics are in Section III


KEEP A POSITIVE ATTITUDE

Attitude is everything. The attitude with which you approach a project has a stronge influence on the outcome. Go into GeoBuilder resolved to be patient and successful. Be resigned to the bugs and quirks and work with them. Even with its shortcomings, GeBuilder is still easier and faster than trying to create pages writing HTML code on a Learn-as-you-go basis. There will be times when you get frustrated with GeoBuilder. Believe me, I've had some expletive moments with GeoBuilder myself.

Don't carry a vindictive attitude into the Help Chat room, and don't bad-mouth GeoBuilder in there. A negative attitude won't get you any help, and it sets a bad tone in the chat room. It is much more productive to rationally discuss the problem and work toward a solution.

For GeoBuilder help, I don't recommend Help Chat, as I rarely find anyone in there who knows anything much about GeoBuilder. Go to GeoBuilder Central or the GeoCities GeoBuilder Help page.


GEOBUILDER AND BROWSERS

The new version, GeoBuilder 1.1, does not seem to work very well with any version of Internet Explorer. You can download Netscape and have it as a second browser. This can be a handy thing.

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