<
p>Since
August
1st when I was honored by WEB-TV and
selected as one
of their featured sites of the month,
most of all the
great letters and postings in my
guestbook have asked
me how I was able to build such an
elaborate
site.
In
response I have created this page to
help the novice
in making a nice looking homepage. One
of the most
important things to remember is when
using graphics
or
songs found on other people's pages, you
must be sure
to transload the information to your
homepage server
and NOT just link to it on someone elses
page. This
avoids the practice known as BANDWIDTH
THEFT and
ensures that the page you found the
desired items on
will not be overtaxed with un-neccesary
traffic. To
understand Transloading better look for
the lesson on
my GRAPHICS page. The first step in
building a homepage is deciding what you
want to put
on it. Some people like to build pages
in recognition
of a favorite artist, actor or author.
Others like
myself build pages around what we
enjoy.
If
you choose to build a page like mine
that gives the
viewer many choices to explore, than a
fair ammount
of time will be needed to get started.
Take for
example my Music page. On it you will
see original
text written by myself. Within that text
I have links
to groups that I listened to as a kid.
For example,
Herman & The Hermits. To have a link,
you must first
find a good web-site that contains the
type of
information you want. So a good amount
of time will
be needed to find sites you want to link
to. I had my
web-tv unit for over 9 months before I
ever started
to build a homepage. During that time I
had found
many cool sites and saved them in my
"Favorites". You
will have to do the same thing.
Therefore it is very
important you know how to use the
FAVORITE section of
your web-tv unit. Also equally important
will be to
know how to make extra folders in your
favorites.
Another very helpful tool to use is the
CUT, COPY &
PASTE feature of the web-tv unit. This
will allow
you to copy some long HTML codes and
paste them in
place rather than type all the
information down.
This can be used to paste in the
addresses of the
links you make as well. All
this information is found in the "USING
WEB_TV" link
off of the homepage. If for example you
want to make
a page about BASEBALL, then you will
want to make a
folder called baseball in your favorites
and save
many sites in that folder to choose from
when you
start constructing your
homepage.
Now that you have the subjects defined and researched, the 2nd step is to make yourself a little computer literate by learning basic HTML language. HTML is a universal language spoken by computers. With this set of codes you can make many different things happen on the screen. Text can be changed in SIZE, and COLOR.Text can be made to look typewritten or the text can be bold. Finally text can be made in italics.
The best place to learn this language is at a site called DRAC'S FREE GIFS 123This site has a very easy school of HTML for you plus thousands of free graphics, songs, backgrounds and more cool stuff. Drac has worked hard for us WEB-TV users and his site is designed especially for us!!!! I can honestly say that my page would never have been made without this marvelous site.
So you now have the basics to get started. Once you have a vision of what you want on your page, then have studied & practiced HTML, you then need a Homepage server. Again I decided on ANGELFIRE, but there are many to choose from. The Angelfire site has a basic page editor that will write most of the HTML codes for you if you want it to, and still allow you to add your own HTML touches. I have found this to be a great service. Once you get better at HTML (trust me you will) you can choose an option where you write all the HTML codes necessary. This is of course harder, but I think also more rewarding.
PEACE-KIM
(TRAPAIRIAN)
