A beginners guide to home page design

Once the site is complete (if any web site can ever be complete), we will take a quick look at search engine placement, banner exchanges other ways of promoting your newly built site. And advanced topics such as using frames.

Web Page Design

The simplest of web pages can be created using a wizard such the one available with Front Page. These pages can then be edited with Frontpage itself or other editors such as Netscape Composer, Word 97, or Hotdog. These are the so called What You See Is What You Get or WYSIWYG editors.

It's quite possible that your favorite word processor may have a Save As HTML or Save As Web Page option. If it does we will use that.

The disadvantage of using the WYSIWYG editors is that they produce very bulky HTML. Sometimes multiple edits on the same page can result in the HTML tags outweighing the contents in size. I have seen a classic example where an 80k file barely managed to fill the browser window.

So once you have your basic web page up and running we will look to learning HTML. Or if you wish to start that right away please bookmark this page and skip ahead to read the HTML page. ;

Web Hosting Services

Now we need a Web Hosting Service. There are many servers on the internet that offer free web pages. The most popular ones are Tripod and Geocites for personnel pages and hypermart.net for business page. The Free Web Providers page has a few more listed.
(please bookmark this page before you check these sites out).

The free service providers insist on displaying their banner ads on your web site. Fair enough they have to eat too. Some also offer ad free hosting, for a price. But then they it's not free space anymore, and you whould be better off with a real ISP.

For a business though it's often worth the investment to obtain a domain name. Which we will look into later. But now we will see how to move the pages onto the server.