A beginners guide to home page design

This page is intended as a guide to those starting to out to write their own home pages. It will take you through.

• Finding a Web Hosting Service
• How to Learn HTML
• Adding graphics to your page
• Bringing in the traffic

Web Hosting Services

The first step in setting up your web pages is to find a host. Several sites including Tripod and Geocities offer upto 2MB of free server space. Ideal for personal web pages. Many ISPs also provide free web pages for their subscribers. your college or place of work may also provide you with a free web page
Those looking to setup their own domain names please check out www.webhostlist.com for a list of the top virtual hosts list.

HTML

If you cant be bothered to learn HTML there are lots of programs that will write your page for you. Your word processor may even have a save as HTML option. But these programs restrict your creativity. Anyway, HTML is fun (HTML - Hyptertext Markup Language is not a programming language) and can be learned in a week
You can always use an HTML editor like Hotmetal to make things easy. But any text editor such as Windows notepad, DOS Editor and Unix vi can be used to write web pages.

Graphics

Many people consider a web page incomplete without graphics. Others surf with graphics switched off. Still others don't even have a browser capable of viewing graphic images
if you decide to add images, please keep the file sizes to a minimum. Many users get turned of by graphics that take a long time to load. Gif Wizard has an excellent service to compact your GIF files. If a large file size cannot be avoided consider linking to the large file by a thumbnail. Click here if you want to add a free graphical navigation bar on your page.

Bringing in the traffic

There's nothing quite like seeing the hits to your page increase steadily. Who knows maybe someday you may even overtake Yahoo.
Getting listed at Yahoo is probably the most important step in building up traffic. But there are other important search engines like Alta Vista and Infoseek that you should register with.
For more on search engines please see the Search Engine Tips page, and the advanced topics.