Getting Started with your Website

WYSIWYG or HTML?
WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editors such as Geocities Geobuilder or Yahoo Pagebuilder, or any of the published pagebuilding programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Publisher etc., are a popular choice with first-time website owners.
They provide that all-important instant gratification and are very straightforward to use - you just type in your text, click-and-drop your graphics and add a few links. You do everything on the screen which shows what you page will look like as you go along, twiddle and fiddle till you get the look you want, and BINGO!! One webpage! They may even provide a selection of backgrounds, buttons and graphics for you to use, or you can use your own graphics.

These WYSIWYG editors are certainly a great way of getting on-line, but they do have their limitations and create problems of their own, and eventually you may well want to create your pages by typing in the raw HTML yourself : that way, you will get the look you want and will probably find your pages easier to edit. (One major drawback with Pagebuilder/Geobuilder is that if you edit a page built with the WYSIWYG editor, eg. to add a webring, by typing or pasting in the HTML, you cannot then go back to using the WYSIWYG editor on that page again: any further edits or additions will have to be done with HTML.)

Page-builder programs also make extensive use of tables in their layout which can slow down loading time (not always a major consideration with website owners, but can be irritating to the average surfer) and these tables are often unnecessarily complicated - which can make editing with HTML quite a headache!

More advanced Web Page building programs, such as Macromedia Flash, have ways of getting round these problems, but if you're that good, why are you reading this??!!

So, if you have decided to have a go at writing a page, or even a full site, in HTML, read on........

Free WebSite Hosting
Before you can create a website, you need somewhere to host it. There are LOTS of providers out there : Yahoo/Geocities, Angelfire, Fortune City and Tripod are four of the big ones, or you can type free+website+host into any search engine and check out the search results.

Whichever you choose, you need to sign up with them for a free website. I chose to go with Geocities originally because they seemed very popular, and you can't fool all of the people all of the time, they offer a LOT of free webspace (currently 15MB and that is more than you're likely to ever need) and their WYSIWYG builder seemed simple to use. They also offer a lot of support volunteers (called "Angels") if you need to call for help. Since then I have tried other hosts but gone back to Geocities, but I no longer use the Geobuilder/Pagebuilder program.

Page Design and Layout
It may be stating the obvious, but you need to have an idea of what you want your page to look like! AND you would best decide this before you even start - that way you will save having to make too many alterations later.

Presumably you will already have a subject for your website; you also need a Title - try to make it individual and/or unusual (I discovered far too late that there are LOTS of "Dianne's Home Pages" on the Net!) You will eventually want to advertise your site to the rest of the world so a catchy title would be a good idea.

Next, decide on a "look" for you site. Bright and colourful? Tasteful and subdued? Think of a suitable colur scheme. Does it have a definite "theme" - Girl Scouts? Dogs? Fishing? Original writing? Cars? - you may want to use a themed background set.

The amount of graphics (pictures etc.) you use is a matter of taste and will probably depend on the subject of your page, but whatever clipart, photos, backgrounds, buttons and dividers you want to use will have to be saved onto your hard drive first then loaded onto your website host server - they will provide instructions for doing this, it isn't difficult. There is a lot of free stuff available all over the Net (including free background sets right here on this site) so do a web search to find clipart and backgrounds you like or use the ones which come with Microsoft Office etc.

(It is common courtesy to provide a link back to the site where you found your clipart etc. - it's a small price to pay for all the work that's gone into creating them!)

The most important page on your whole site is your Home Page or index page (which will almost always be called "/index.html") This is the entry page into your site and the first page people will see. If it isn't attractive, they may not bother to go any further. Think of it as a "front cover" - make the title eye-catching, give an indication of what the rest of your site contains, and link it up to the other pages of your site. You can get some ideas of what you like and what you don't like, what works and what doesn't, by just surfing the net and looking at other people's web pages.

Having got this far, you now need to be able to put in some Elementary HTML.