Happy Memorial Day!

May 2002

If you are a veteran, I thank you for the sacrifices you have made that allow us the freedom to live the way we do. Truly, putting your life on the line for your country is something that takes committment and courage.

 Have you ever thought about having your own web page? Did you know that you can probably get one "for free"?

Most ISPs - Internet Service Providers - provide their customers with 5 meg of storage space for a personal web page. Of course, this means you have to learn how to build one and how to upload it to their server, but there are a lot of advantages to having one. Keep in mind that this free web page is restricted to personal information only - no business or commercial pages are allowed. If you do post commercial content, they will ask you to remove it or risk being canceled as a customer.

Why would you want a web page? Well, if you are like the majority of Americans, you have family spread all across this great nation. With a personal web page you can share photos and stories about your life and they can visit and stay up to date. You can keep an online journal, write short stories (or long), poems, scan your artwork, talk about whatever your interests are so that all of your family and friends can get to know you better. Maybe you have a hobby that you are an expert on - you can dedicate a few pages to just that topic and help others learn to enjoy your hobby as well. After all, hobbies are nice, but they are so much more fun when you can share them! You can also keep a geneology page and have your extended family contribute. Or keep a family address book so everyone can stay in touch, no matter how often they move around the country. The possibilities are endless, limited only by your own imagination! You might even think of it as a virtual refrigerator door - where you post all this jokes, cartoons, the childrens drawings, schedules, etc.? Only this way it can be seen from anywhere! Need a pick-me-up at work? Log on to your web page!

So how would you go about starting a personal web page? First off, visit the web site for your local ISP. They usually have a section for members, and in that area they will explain how you go about signing up for your free web site. Once that is done, you need to learn how to create a web site.

Hold on - what's the difference between a web site and a web page? These terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a big difference. "Web site" refers to the entire site - for example, my web site is http://www.the-grizz.com/ .

A "web page" is any individual page within a site. For example, you might go to http://www.the-grizz.com/reminder.htm - that is a web page within the site of 'the-grizz.com'.

To get started, stick to paper and pencil. Draw an outline of how you want the site to be laid out. The first page will be the entry page. From that page, you will have links that lead to other pages. Once you have a layout, then you can start planning the individual pages. Again, stick to paper and pencil for now. Draw out each page, where the text will be, where the pictures will be. Pencil is great because you can erase it so easily! Get the whole family involved.  

Now for the hard part. You'll have to do the code work somehow. The easiest way of course is to have someone else do it! If you are lucky, you'll know a teenager that is learning how to build web pages and they will do it just for the practice. If not, you really can tackle this on your own. Since you probably don't want to take the time to learn all the code - after all, this is supposed to be fun - you will want a web page editor. This is a program that lets you create web pages without knowing how! What could be better?? Of course, most of them won't cut it for a professional commercial site, but they are great for the personal fun page.

There are many editors to choose from, some are free, some are shareware, some are quite expensive. Some examples include FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Fusion, etc. The simplest one - and cheapest - is Netscape Composer - part of Netscape Communicator. It's free, and best of all, it's a WYSIWYG.

Huh?? WYSIWYG?? That stands for What You See Is What You Get. In other words, you start typing and inserting pictures just as if you were working in MS Word, and Netscape writes the code in the background. For the beginner, this is definitely the best way to go. You can see exactly what you are creating as you create it, and you don't need to worry about the code.

Once you've created your site on your own computer and worked out all the bugs, you'll then need to upload it to the ISP's server so people on the internet can see it. This involves something called FTP. That stands for File Transfer Protocal. Don't worry about the Protocal part, just remember it means file transfer - it lets you transfer files from your computer to another one on the internet.  

Of course, that's just the basics, there are a lot of other details involved along the way, but most are pretty easy to handle, and there are a number of great resources on the web that will help you learn more in detail. Start with just one or two pages for your site, that way you will feel so good when you see it on the web that you will be ready to build a massive site of hundreds of pages!  

You can learn a little more by reading my web page primer, which can be found at http://www.the-grizz.com/computerhelp/primer.html .

 This site maintained by The Computer Counselor