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UH...What's an html editor? Most folk use a program called an html editor to lay out and create their web page. There is a fantastic free html editor called AOLpress, and it works great. Create a page, choose background, font size & colors, place images and text with links. With this program you will be able to create html files and save them, and that's good. Click Here To Download AOL Press If you want images on your new web site, and you do not have a digital camera or scanner, many photo places now offer pictures on floppy disc, CD or in your e-mail, when printing your rolls of film. Two mail in companies that are really affordable are York Photo and PhotoWorks. You want all the pictures you put on your web page to be in .jpg or .gif format. Bmp files take too long to load... jpg files are the best I find.
Irfan View is a great little image viewer. It's a FREE program. This little program does a big job! It views every common type of image, crops, thumbnails, slide shows, rotates, batch converts...I use it all the time for reference while I'm working. Makes it easy to know which image you want to use, when some names of files don't reflect what they are (like numbers etc...). I used to make my pages with AOLpress, and use Irfan View at the same time to easily look through and choose images to add to my pages. Works like a dream.
FIRST, YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR GREETING PAGE, AND NAME IT, index.html If you do not have an html editor such as Dreamweaver, Page Mill, or Front Page, download AOLpress, it's free. AOLpress is pretty easy to figure out, so spend an evening or two just playing with the tutorial found in the help program. Make a bunch of mistakes and just learn from them, one at a time. To make learning this program easier follow the directions below: Create a new folder right now, call it anything you want, like My Web, and use it to save your web site files. Save your html files and all your image files, jpg and gif files, to this folder so they can all find each other. PC people use Windows Explorer to do this. Drag or copy all the images you plan to use into this folder. I create a new folder for every web site I build. If you have images that are not jpg format, use Irfan View, and do a Batch Conversion into jpg files, and set it to send this converted jpg file to your folder called My Web. After you figure out how to change colors, add images, and create hyperlinks and so on with AOLpress, begin to design your own web page. A greeting page should load fast, so it should not have too much content on it. Think of it as a title page or a table of contents. A company name or logo with a few links will do just fine. I believe it is best to have many pages that load fast than to over crowd a page and make it load slow. People tend to get bored fast, and may go away without seeing your site. Your very first page needs to be called index.html because all web browsers look for that file as the first page. When you finish your page, click FILE, and then SAVE AS, type in the words index.html and click SAVE or ENTER. You are now ready to load this file or "FTP" the file to your web server so it is accessible to the world wide web. EXAMPLE:
POSTING YOUR PAGE: FOR AOL MEMBERS ONLY For AOL users, you already are getting 10 megs of space on your AOL account. All the screen names on your account share the 10 megs and has 2 megs each. If your screen name is NewWebMaster@aol.com then your web address will be http://members.aol.com/NewWebMaster/index.html When you use up the 2 megs, you can just link to another of your pages until you have used all 10 megs of space. Log on to the AOL screen name you want to use. Click up at the top on "keyword"-Then type in the words my place and click GO. Now click "See My FTP Space" (Newer versions of AOL you click Internet > FTP near the top of the browser). Click "Upload" The name of your first file has to be index.html, so in the Remote File Name Box type, index.html and click Continue. Now click Select File, browse to your file index.html wherever you have saved it (The MyWeb folder I had you make) and click Send. When this file has loaded, your first page is up. It's address will be, http://members.aol.com/NewWebMaster/index.html (but people don't have to type the index.html part because that is the name of all first pages). All other pages can be named anything you like with the .html file name at the end. Your other pages can be named anything you want, and you just link to them. So your next page may be called Page2.html, so it's address is http://members.aol.com/NewWebMaster/Page2.html and so on for ever and ever.
LINKING UP ALL YOUR PAGES Once you learn how to make your "index.html" page, you are ready to make the other pages that follow. Just as you are here on my web page, if you click any of the underlined text, it links you to another web page. These are called hyperlinks. With hyperlinks you can link up all your pages. First you need your pages, because you need their name to link to. Index.html is the only page name that has to be that exact name. You can SAVE the rest of your pages as anything.html or page2.html, whatever.html. (Any combination of letters/numbers with .html after it.) Then on your main page, you will highlight text, click the 'add hyperlink' icon on your html editor, and type in the name of your page you wish to link to, such as, anything.html in this case. Now the word you highlighted should be underlined, and a different color. With that done, you can add hyperlinks to any text anywhere on the page to your other pages, page2.html and whatever.html and now visitors can see the rest of your site. Remember to click Save whenever you change your page. Hyperlinks can be added to images by highlighting the image, clicking the hyperlink icon, and typing the page name into the field that pops up. It's just like with text. I like to create hyperlinks that are on every page, so it's easy to navigate around. |
