HOW TO MAKE A HOME PAGE

Getting started This tutorial will teach you how to write your own web pages by using HTML. You do not need any special what-you-see-is-what-you-get HTML editor to use this guide, any old text editor will do just fine. By learning HTML, you will have much more control over how your web pages look, and you'll more easily discover ways to make your web pages look even better. HTML is platform independent, meaning it can be written and viewed on any type of computer (Windows, Mac, UNIX/Linux, whatever!) Because HTML is platform independent, you'll need to save your HTML files in standard (ASCII) text format. The easiest way to do this is use a program like notepad.exe in Windows, pico in Linux, and the like. If you'd prefer to use a word processor like Word or WordPerfect to write your HTML code, you can do so, but you need to save your files as "Text" or "Text Only." You'll see this option in a drop down box in your "Save As..." screen. If you use a word processor and forget to save it as Text, you'll see only garbled data when you try to view your page with a web browser. If you'd like to immediately start learning HTML, you can skip to MiniChapter 1 now. If you choose to do so, please come back to this chapter later. The very important sections below discuss issues such as finding a place to put your web site and tips for getting your web page to work correctly on the first shot. Finding a Host Service (Web Server)... Unless you run your computer and Internet connection 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and have special permission to run a web server through your Internet connection, you will need to find a company that is willing to host (serve) your web site. By finding a host, your pages will be available all day, every day, except during temporary network outages (when your host is disconnected from the Internet, usually lasting less than 10 minutes) and hardware maintenance upgrades (when your host is putting your web server on an even faster computer *wink*). If you are learning HTML primarily for a personal web site, you can contact your ISP (Internet Server Provider) or Commercial Online Service (AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc.) and ask them about personal home page services. Most ISPs and COSs will provide links on their home pages giving you information about setting up your personal web page. Many people starting out with HTML choose to use a free home page host instead of an ISP/COS host. A free host will give you space to store your pages and graphics at no cost. Most show ad banners when your page is loaded so they can pay for their servers. I'd suggest getting a host with 10 to 20MB (megabytes) of space. HTML files are very small, and web graphics formats (.gif and .jpg) are compressed formats, which means they are saved smaller and more efficiently. (To give you some idea as to how much space is enough, the entire davesite.com web site is less than 15MB of data, including all web pages and graphics.) A few good free home page hosts include Tripod and Angelfire. (These free hosts display ads, usually pop-ups, when someone visits your web site.) (Update: I no longer recommend Yahoo! Geocities because of a new price plan which forces you to pay about $5 per month if you want FTP access to publish your site. It would be silly to pay $5 for a 'free host' when you can have your very own domain (.com, .net, or .org) registered and hosted for less than $8 per month at a reputable host such as Globat or iPowerWeb.) If you are looking for a place to host a business site (or you plan to make money with your web site), it is wisest to immediately consider a professional web host and then register a domain name. See my guide to domains chapter for a basic introduction to registering and setting up a domain. Check out FindYourHosting.com for popular inexpensive hosts. When you sign up for a free host or a domain host, you get to pick a username and password. (On free hosts, your username is generally the directory people type to get at your site, so choose wisely.) Only you (or anyone that you tell your password to) can modify your web pages. I prefer free home pages hosts and domain hosts over ISP/COS hosts because if you leave your ISP/COS, they will no longer host your pages for you (the minority that will *still* host your site after you leave may charge you a hefty monthly fee). If all of your friends have links to your web site, those links will no longer work. If your pages are hosted on a free service, you can change your ISP/COS without any effect to your site's address. And if you decide to get a domain, you'll never have to worry about changing ISPs or hosts, because it will always be transparent to your site's visitors. Writing your Files... Once you have found a place to host your web site on the web, you'll need to start creating your pages. When you are starting out with HTML files, it's a good idea to have two copies of it. One copy should be on your host (accessible to anyone on the Internet) and the second copy should be on your hard drive or a floppy disk. Once you have edited your pages from your own computer using a text editor, you can use FTP (file transfer protocol, explained in MiniChapter 10) to upload, or copy, them to your host. I suggest having these two copies for backup reasons. (However, If your computer crashes, and your host computer crashes, you no longer have your files, and you'll have to start over from scratch unless you've backed them up elsewhere.) I recommend that when you write your web page, you first create a directory on your hard drive to place the HTML files and graphics files. Simply find your hard drive, and create a new directory (folder), and call it something like like homepage. (You could also use a floppy disk or Zip disk.) Then, when you save an HTML file, you can save it to that directory. You'll want to save the file with an extension of .html. (If you are using an older operating system like Windows 3.1/3.11, you could just save it as .htm, it'll act the same way on a web server.) (Caution: Although you don't *have* to have the extra l at the end of the file, it does not mean it will *be* the same file. You can have one file called mycat.htm and one file called mycat.html on your host, and they are two completely separate files.) Using "index.html" Your main web page file must be titled index.html, because this is the way almost all web hosts' servers are set up to handle the main page of your site. (You can check with the techie in charge of your host/web server if you can't get index.html to work. Some systems use other filenames, for example: default.html) Note to Microsoft Windows Users: If you are using notepad.exe to edit your HTML files, and you type index.html as the name of your file when you save it, notepad may automatically name it index.html.txt! To get around this, when you save an html file with notepad, type quotation marks around the file. Instead of typing index.html, type "index.html". This tells notepad not to use the default .txt extension. How index.html Acts: Let's say you saved three HTML files to your hard drive, one is your main home page file, one is a page about yourself, and one is a page with your favorite links. It would look something like this: Directory homepage aboutme.html links.html index.html Now, say you got a Tripod Account as your_user_name. When you FTP these three files onto your Tripod space, they can be accessed on the web by anyone as: http://members.tripod.com/~your_user_name/aboutme.html http://members.tripod.com/~your_user_name/links.html http://members.tripod.com/~your_user_name/index.html The latter of the three files, index.html, can also be accessed as http://members.tripod.com/~your_user_name/, because almost all web servers use index.html as the default web page. (When the user asks for / on a directory, it merely shows the index.html file trasparently.) Browsing your Hard Drive... If you are editing index.html with your text editor, wouldn't it be nice to see what your page looks like while you are editing it? Well you can! Just start up your web browser, and select File, Open File and find the file on your hard drive. Then go back to your text editor, change a line, hit save, and click reload/refresh with your browser! It changes! Common Errors when editing pages... Say you wrote a link page, called links.html on your hard drive, saved as c:\homepage\links.html (on a Windows PC, or similarly on other operating systems). Then you decide to link it from index.html as c:\homepage\links.html. You browse your files on your hard drive, and the link works fine. Then you upload it to the web, and get one of your friends to try. When they click the link, they will get an error saying "File Not Found"! Why? Because there is no c:\homepage\links.html on their hard drive! When you're starting out, don't use directories. Just save both HTML and graphics in the same directory. If you are trying to link or load a file (discussed later) called taco.jpg, just use taco.jpg, not c:\homepage\taco.jpg or the like. Your finished HTML file should never mention your hard drive's letter (or name).

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