Make Your Own Web Page
A little information on making a page of your own!

A few months ago I literally had no experience designing web sites, and until very recently I had no experience writing HTML. My point: anyone can make a web site. Really. There's just some stuff you have to know before you do it.

First, you need an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is just a way of connecting to the internet and checking out the world wide web. Since you're looking at this page, you're already there. For a while I used idirect, which now is looktown.com but I eventually switched to the much faster cable line. There's plenty out there so just take your pick.

Second, you need to get a domain, which is like a little piece of the "information super highway" (cheesy!) of your very own. You can either pay to get one or leach off of someone else's (which is what I do). If you decide to pay for it, it shouldn't run you more than $20 or $30 bucks a month. If you leach off someone else's then you pay nothing.
The major difference between the two is space, flexibility and advertisements.
I'm okay for space right now, but my web site isn't too huge. If you have a lotta pages, sometimes you can run into problems.
On some free web hosts you're limited in the sort of pages you can use, like I'm back to using geocities.com , after a short little stint at fiberia.com . The main difference between the two is that geocities doesn't support Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts which are important for forms, guest books and the like. Instead, they give you a premade guest book. CGI scripting takes a little more time then I have available right now, so I'm using geocities for the time being.
The main inconvenience is advertising. Like when you open my web page there's some banners on it, right? See 'em? Well, that helps to keep my page free. But it also makes my page look a little cluttered and "commercialized". This is a big deal if you have a company web page, since you have little control over what ads appear on your page, but it's not such a big deal for personal web pages like mine.

Third, you need a program to get your web page files into your domain. I use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program, which you can download for free from the internet. I use WS_FTP LE. Probably your ISP offers a FTP program already (yeah, check the lingo!). The program may seem a little tricky at first, but there's step by step instructions that come with it so you should be fine.

And now you're set! You've got a way to connect to the net, a place to put your pages and a way to get your pages up. Now all you gotta do is make the pages...

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