Several people have asked me about buiding websites, so rather than emailing the same message each time, I thought I'd put the information on my website.
The book I use is "HTML Goodies" by Joe Burns, but the primers are available
on the html goodies website, www.htmlgoodies.com so if you don't want a hefty tome taking up space you can work through it from there.
There are many similar books and resources available.
I usually prepare my website pages on my PC first and then upload/copy/transfer them to my website later on.
You can save a webpage locally on your PC using the browser tools, as well as read the underlying code. This can be useful whilst you are just starting to learn how to build your site, or you want to prepare it all first before letting the rest of the world see it.
There are also a lot of code generators - MS Word, Excel etc will let you save your document as a webpage, and if you buy a new PC it will probably have MS FrontPage - which is Microsoft's web building package.
Code generators often produce inefficient code with lots of unnecessary instructions, but writing the code yourself in notepad can get a bit tedious.
I wouldn't use these for an overall end webpage, but have found them useful for generating a specific format when I haven't had access to the reference book.
Dreamweaver is highly reccomended, but is relatively expensive if you only want to do a small amount.
Also, what works when veiwed by one PC may not work as well on another machine - for example my main PC has a 14" screen because that is the one that fits on the desk until I buy a flat screen monitor and some sites don't fit the screen; some of the people I know who use an Apple Mac got a page with empty spaces where the pictures should have been because of the way I'd coded some of the pages (oops!)
Joe Burn's instructions are prettty good, so I'd reccomend using
his instructions rather than me repeating them.
The html goodies site has a discussion forum, as do Tiscali and Yahoo. If you are unfamiliar with discussion forums, you need to sign in to them, but then you can ask questions on all manner of topics and other people can see your question and are generally quite helpful providing answers. Some questions are harder to answer than others!
If you want to try building a website on the internet or upload one you can
get free space with Yahoo/geocities - link below - which has an upload facility with it, so you don't need to find an FTP application separately. For those of you who wondered why my Tiscali site hasn't been updated recently - because I can't get CuteFTP to talk to it. The Geocities software has never given me any trouble.
In fact, I'm coding this directly into the Geocities file manager edit feature, online, so I apologise for any spelling errors and dodgy punctuation because I can't be bothered to look in the book and check how to do it properly.
Yahoo/Geocities also has some code generators a BLOG and other facilities free, which I've not used, but may suit depending on what you are wanting to acheive with your website.
Most ISPs give you some free webspace with your account, so you can have a free website for only a small amount of fiddly editing. If you already have an email account check what you can use with it for free.
So if you want to use the free Geocities website just set up a Yahoo id, if you've not got one, and go to their site geocities.yahoo.co.uk or geocities.yahoo.com and play.
And for some reason the code which is supposed to make a new Browser window open for the link and leave this one open on this page is not quite working.
And, the same reason as so much of my websites are imperfect, I really don't have time to do anything about this now.