It's true, the real reason I'm writing this is to shamelessly beg you to read my web page La Voz de Esperanza. If you're into radical stuff or want another reason to despise liberals, check it out. Anyway, the first thing to realize about building your own web page is "IT'S EASY". If you can type, and understand a few easy to learn formatting concepts, you too can have the Vanity Plates of the 90's. And with internet providers giving free web pages, the cost is kind of nice also.
Let's look at the tools you will need. First get a book on the subject. I happened to buy " Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week". The author (Laura Lemay) did not lie. The book was simple and easy to read. And I did have my page up and running in a week.
Second, you need some type of ASCII text editor. You can use any word processor, just remember to save your text as ASCII. However, the text editors I would really recommend would also double as an HTML language editor. I use Hotdog Standard (ftp://ftp.sausage.com/pub/hotdog10.exe.)
Third you'll need some pictures. You'll want background, pictures, icons, and you won't want to have to pay for them. If a bit weights an ounce, there are literally tons of pictures out there. Some of my favorite places to look are World Wide Web Power Index - Icons (www.webcom.com/power/icons.html), Icons and Images for Use in HTML Documents (www.infi.net/~rdralph/icons/) and Picture Pages (users.aimnet.com/~dragnet/gallery/). If these don't help you, just do a Yahoo search (www.yahoo.com) on backgrounds or icons or pictures.
You're ready to go. All you need to know now is: "Just what message do I want to send?" Web pages can be a great hobby. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, reading someone else's page, you can go in and contribute. People have their own page to send a message about themselves; to tell the world who they are. So here is your opportunity. Write about, yourself, build links to places you think others will enjoy, have fun with it. Just keep it updated. You may want to do an Election Watch, where you could get pictures of the candidates, their speeches, provide links to their home pages. Since politicians are always speaking, you will want to keep your page somewhat current. Keeping track of politician's positions should keep you off the streets.
There are just a couple things you need to remember. The first is appearance. Not everyone is using Netscape. This will be especially true, now that they will soon charge. In short, your web page will not look the same to every browser. All modesty aside, my page look pretty good when viewed with Netscape. It has a nice background, the pictures are centered, I have centered text, different sizes of text, etc. However, when viewed through another browser, say the American Online Browser, all that changes. I have a white background, the browser does not recognize centering, or text size changes. In fact, it get worse, a person who was viewing the web page using AOL and a Mac computer said, it was unreadable, all the text came out italics. I told her if she had bought a real computer she would not have had that problem. My point is, not everyone has a real computer or a real browser. Please keep that in mind.
Another tip: don't fall in love with pictures. First, most browsers will only recognize GIF formats. So any other pictures you use, that are not in GIF format, must be converted to said format. More importantly, GIF files are big.
The bigger the picture you want to use, the more data must be moved over the telephone lines. We all don't have Pentium 90s with a 28.8 modem. Some people are bandwidth challenged. Some silly people are still limping along with a 486/33 and a 14.4 modem. Just because they are silly doesn't mean you want to exclude them from enjoying your page. Just remember: the bigger the file, the longer it takes to download to their screen. The bigger the file and the slower the computer/modem, the even LONGER it takes to down load to their screen. There have times I wanted to look at someone's web page. However, the person loaded so much graphic stuff, that the process went on, and on, and on, until I got bored, stopped it and went on to another page. I know you want to grab someone's attention. But if they don't get TO your front page because of the graphics, you've wasted your time.
Finally, before you go on-line check your links and run your various pages over and over. Debug it. This is what makes Hotdog so good. You can debug your pages while they are on your computer - before you FTP them to the server. As a programmer, I would always have a novice come in and try to break it. You may want to try the same. If the novice can figure it out, and make it work, you are probably on to something.
There you have it. Not too many rules - and it's easy. So give
it a try and have your named bounced all over the world.