Your boss comes and tells you to distribute some information. Your home business needs another way to generate some publicity and interest. Your daughter's little league team needs to be able to keep track of the season. Your stamp collecting club wants to distribute a newsletter. You find that you want to build a Web page.
Good News! Building a Web page is easy! With a minimal amount of effort, you can put information up so that the world can come knocking at your door to retrieve it. There is no other technology that allows you to make information available to a potential audience of billions of people cheaper or faster than the Web. And here's how to do it...
Before you even begin to think about making a Web page, sit down and think about what it is, exactly what it is, that you want to say. Write out your text ahead of time, using any 'ole word processor, but use one with a spell checker! Few things detract from a good Web page like casual misspellings. Collect your text. Write it out. Re-read what you've written. Re-write bits and make it better. Ask your buddies to read what you've written, and listen to their comments. Make the verbiage sing! Because in the end, if people aren't interested in what you have to say, you've lost them as an audience, and they'll never come back. Now maybe it's hard to imagine making something like a little league schedule stand up and sing, but a bit of careful thought about the look, feel, and content of your page ahead of time will save you a lot of trouble later when you actually get around to creating the page. Transmitting information is what it's all about, and the majority of your effort should be directed towards creating the information that you want to convey.
Having created the best content that you are capable of, the next step is to develop the look and feel of your Web page. The easiest way to make such a page is to find one you like and steal it! Now don't worry, this isn't an illegal act. With the exception of owned, copyright images and the actual content of a page, using somebody else's already existing Web page as a template for your own page is an excellent way to begin your own creative process of Web page creation. By using the File > Save As option in your browser, and then saving the source file on your computer, you have an example of the code required to make a page similar to the one you have in mind. Using this document allows you to get a head start on making your own Web page. Perhaps your company has an example of the type of page that you are to create. Perhaps your club page could start out looking like a page from a club with a similar interest. Maybe you just like the way the information is displayed on a page you saw in your bookmarks list. Find a page that has a similar look and feel, and start with that one. Cut their images and text out of that file and put your own in. If you're happy with the way that your page looks, use that file as a template for all subsequent pages that you create. After all, if it works, stick with it!
By comparing the HTML coded file you've saved with the visual output as translated by your browser, you can see and use concrete examples of HTML coding in action. It's all image and text manipulation anyway! By doing that, as well as with some supplemental reading and exploring in any one of dozens of HTML coding guides, you can make your text and images sing, dance, and salute the people who come to your site looking for information.
Having created your first page, use your browser to look at it. It doesn't have to be on a Web server for you to load it into your browser, just put the directory and file path name into the location field. Look at the way your page is presented on your screen. Is that what you had in mind? Don't be afraid of changing your page around a bit. After all, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people will come calling if they're interested in what you have to say. Now is the time to spend effort balancing your perfect content that you created earlier with the perfect visual presentation.
Now keep in mind that how you say something is as important, if not more so, than what you're actually saying. Take great care to use a background color that allows the text to be seen. Too many people use some fantastically complicated background pattern that completely overwhelms the text on their page. There is a special corner of Hell for people who do this! At the other end of the spectrum, do use a background color of some sort. Too many people rely on the default grey background, and while this isn't a mortal sin, it is a Web misdemeanor. If in doubt, use a white background with black text. It's hard to go wrong with a format that has served newspapers well for over two-hundred years...
It's easy to go overboard with the use of pictures and graphics on a page. Keep in mind that the more pictures you have, the longer the viewer's browser will take to down load your page. Some people will not wait! They'll become bored easily, and surf right on past your page. Your page will generate a hit count, but you'll have lost that opportunity to communicate with somebody who has at least taken the trouble of stopping by. So keep the number of images on your page to a minimum, and minimize the size of those images too. That 200Kb Gif file of your new product line may look impressive, but you might be better served by creating a smaller copy, perhaps 2Kb in size, and linking the big picture from the small one. That way, if somebody is interested in seeing the big picture, they can go find it, where if they don't much care, they don't have to wait a long time for the big picture to load while waiting to look at your page. There is a special bit of information that you can put in the tag that references your image and tells the viewer's browser just how big on the screen the image will be. This allows the browser to allocate that much space for the picture, and printing the text on the page while you wait. This lets the user read the text while waiting for the down load.
I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here and publish long lists of HTML tags, but I will direct you to other sites that I feel do a really good job at tag presentation. Check these out, with an eye towards making your text and images dance and sing!
In my opinion, the best all around HTML learning site is the Webmonkey Teaching Tool. Nicely laid out, with enough humor and attitude to make an entertaining read.
Along with that is the Webmonkey Reference page. Here's the list of tags that I didn't want to provide.
And the last Webmonkey Index, where you can search by the words themselves. It's an index, right? So if you have an idea that you want to search for, start here...
Enough Webmonkey. If it's colors you want, see all the colors at the RGB Hex Triplet Color Chart. Pick and choose a good background or text color from a table showing many of the available colors. But don't forget to check them against each other at Interactive Color Selector. Pick a color code for the background, text, link, selected link, and followed link color, and see in advance what they all look like together. Don't make the mistake of putting up a text color that can't be seen on top of the background color that you've chosen...
that you need some sort of account to publish Web pages? If you need an account, look in the yellow pages, or check out a local computing magazine. The local newspaper might have Internet Service Providers advertising in the Business section. Ask your friends who they use, and what they might have heard about other ISPs. If you can find unlimited access time for less than twenty bucks a month, it's probably a pretty good deal. You'll never know about busy signal rejection rate or wait times on their help line until after you've been signed up for a while. You probably shouldn't put too many pages up on the first ISP that you sign up with. Chances are that you will become unhappy with them after a while, and you'll take your business elsewhere. Web pages have addresses that are like phone numbers, and if you change your phone number often enoug, nobody will be able to find you! How many pages have you searched for, only to get an error telling you that the file is not found? This is a sign that the file used to be there, but got deleted when the owner moved on. Once you find an ISP that you're happy with, go ahead and use the memory allocation that you're allowed to create and store Web pages and image files to your hearts content. My ISP allows five million bytes of information to be stored and accessed on my account. (This is about four of the 3 1/2 inch storage disks) That's enough to hold dozens of pages and dozens of large image files. Plenty for my purposes. You can get an account through GeoCities that give you two-hundred thousand bytes of storage for free, providing you jump through their hoops of sign-up foolishness. Most ISPs have information available that helps you to create pages, put up, and maintain them. If you like your ISP, stick with them. Support their business. Help them fight the onslaught of national ISPs that care mostly about taking your money and ignoring you afterwards. Vote with your wallet, and find one that treats you well, then treasure that business for the rest of your digital life.
Copyright 1997 by Richard B. Webb, aka The Outsider.
This page is authored and maintained by Rich Webb (aka the Outsider).
You can send E-mail to me at richwebb*nospam*@gte.net. (just remember to remove the "*nospam*" from the address before you send it...)
Feel free to visit Rich Webb's home page while you're out surfing, or just go back to the rantpage index.
This document was placed here on April 12, 1997, and has been viewed
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