This tutorial is for people who haven't got a web page but they are looking for a place to put up their banners not for advertisement but for the purpose of making them available to webmasters and friends. The advantage of this is that you don't need to use e-mail to send your banners to interested parties and most important you can change the graphics of the web banner without having to resend the graphic files. I have created a similar page myself so you can see what I mean:
http://www.geocities.com/nassosvakalis/MYBANNERS.html
Your first step is to open your own Yahoo geocities account. Right click on this link http://geocities.yahoo.com/join/ and open a new browser. This service is free and only takes a few minutes. Like your cafepress account http://www.cafepress.com/ YOURSTORE this geocities page has a similar URL structure: http://www.geocities.com/ YOURSTORE if you used YOURSTORE as a username for your geocities account. When you open the account and you are logged in you see a page called Geocities Control Panel. From there you can choose Create and Update and a new page will be shown to you. You have an option to choose to create your page either via the yahoo! Pagebuilder tool or via the HTML editor. The reason my tutorial focuses on the HTML editor is because I think you want to get started as soon as possible and the yahoo! Pagebuilder is a software and not only it has it's own learning curve but needs special settings to run on your browser. You can figure out yahoo! Pagebuilder later on your own.
Scroll done and find and click on File Manager. A new page will show up, make sure show, html, gif, jpeg and other are all marked and press Open File Manager. Do you see your URL: http://www.geocities.com/ YOURSTORE ? At the right side there is a button called Upload Files. Click on it to go to the easy upload page and upload your banners in a similar fashion you upload your images to cafepress media basket. When finished go back to File Manager and you will see all the images you uploaded listed under Name. Under Name is also a file called index.html, you will create your page by editing this file. You can now rename the file to MYBANNERS.html by checking the little box on the left and then clicking Rename. After renaming the file, check the little box on the left again and click Edit. What you get is an HTML editor. Don't panic because what you need to do is very simple. In the text editor find the first time the word <body> is show and under it type:
<BODY BGCOLOR=blue>
<H3>MY BANNERS</H3><BR>
The code <BODY BGCOLOR=blue> gives you a blue background color. You might use other color names but be warned not all color names will work. Go to this page for more color information: http://www.utexas.edu/learn/html/colors.html
<H3> makes your type large and bold and <BR> and gives you a line brake.
Under that cut and paste the following code:
<img src=" http://www.geocities.com/ YOURSTORE/image.gif" > <BR>
Make sure to change image.gif with the file name of one of the images you uploaded earlier and YOURSTORE with your actual username you used to log in geocities. Note that this can be a jpeg image too.
Underneath of that type:
CUT & PASTE THE HTML CODE<BR>
Under that cut and paste the following code:
<PRE>;&#60;a href="http://cafepress.com/ YOURSTORE/ "&#62;
&#60;img border="0" src=" http://www.geocities.com/ YOURSTORE/image.gif"&#62; <PRE>
Please make sure you type this right otherwise your page will not look correct. Again customize the code with your own image and store info. If you don't know the URL of an image you just uploaded go to the File Manger page find the image and click View. Then cut and paste the URL from the browser address window.
This can be repeated as many times as you wish every time using another image or even another URL for example the URL for a specific product page.
Your banner page is now ready. Don't forget to press Save to save the changes.
Your new page will have the following URL: http://www.geocities.com/YOURSTORE/MYBANNERS.html
If you choose to change an image later you only need to go to Upload Files and upload the new image on top of the old one by means of using the same image name. Since two images with the same name can't be in the same folder the new image will override the old one but the link to the image will remain the same so the banners you have given away will immediately link to the new image!
PS. This tutorial is not going to make your page searchable or add any other valuable info to your page, it meant to be an introduction to how you can make your banners available to the public.