How To Set Up An Internet Site
There is a lot of free space available on the Internet and if that isn't enough, rates for extra space are very reasonable also. Typically, a free site will add some sort of advertising to your pages and it seems to be not much of a hindrance and can even add something of interest.
Firstly, you have to register with a hosting company and there are many to choose from. If it is to be for non-commercial use, it seems there is none better than Geocities, which is part of the Yahoo! organisation. That means it is likely to be there for some time. Also, in time you will probably want to promote your site and it can't work against you that it is hosted by one of the biggest companies involved with the Internet which runs the best Internet directory and uses the search engine, Google.
To register with Geocities visit their home page, which is available from Yahoo!'s home page. You need to fill in an online form and should then be given the address of your first page. You can upload your own page design for that page and when you upload other pages they are connected to it with hyperlinks, which you programme in when you redo your first page and compose the extra ones.
You need to make a careful note of your user name and password when you register and of the address of your home page. When you visit Geocities to work on your site you log on giving your user name and password.
Geocities has a very easy upload facility. Your prepared pages are selected from your hard disk using their browse command and your first page needs to have the name, index.htm, which is the file name of the dummy page they have previously inserted for you. The act of uploading your page with the name of an existing one replaces the one previously there. So, if you upload other pages along with your new index page and they are connected to it with hyperlinks, you have a site up and running.
An html editor is used to produce the pages of your site and these programmes are quite easy to use after a while. From the Windows Start menu choose Programs, InternetExplorer and then FrontPageExpress, or whatever html programme you have there or elsewhere. Other operating systems are essentially the same. When the programme opens, a blank page should be ready for use. Type a title for the page as the first line, whether you set it in large text or not.
Your first page is the index page and the first line you type should be the name of your site. Then, under File, select Save As. What you typed on the first line of the page appears automatically in the box as the page title. This is the name of your site and is what search engines find when they look through directory listings. Next select 'As File' and another box opens with a lower case file name derived from your page title. You change that to index. That is the file name you use for uploading your home page to your Geocities directory. Everybody who uses Geocities has a home page with that file name so it wouldn't be any use for search engines. That is why your page has, in effect, more than one title. Other pages you upload could have the same title in both places if you like.
For file names other than that of your index page, decide on the system you want to use when you have clicked As File and you are thinking what to put in the box. You may prefer something like this: MyFileName, or could use all lower case titles like: myfilename. Lower case names might be better if you plan to use older programmes and MSDos. The first sort may be easier to read. This save will usually be done to your My Documents folder unless you choose another. When you use Geocities' browse facility to upload, it lets you navigate through the directory listing of your computer to the correct folder.
You should be able to produce an index page with a page title and a file name with what I have written above here. For Geocities the file name of the index page must be index.htm as I said before and FrontPageExpress will automatically add the extension .htm when you have typed the word, index, and you save.
The title derived automatically from the first line you typed on the page, which I suggested you make your site title, can be anything you like and if and when your site is picked up by search engines that is the name they will register it under and that is the name they will use when they include your page in their search results. This title, then, can usefully include one or two keywords that will help your site to be found. When you make that first save of the site title you can add a couple of words to what was on your first line if it doesn't seem descriptive enough. For example, if you typed Joe's Site as your first line, then when you choose Save and the box opens with Joe's Site already in it, you could change it to: Joe's Music, Pictures and Travel Site. That is what would be picked up by search engines.
It can take search engines a very long time to notice that your page is there but it's worth giving the title a little thought right from the start. Also, it can be examined by using the 'View' command and then 'Source' or 'HTML' depending on what programme you are using to view the page. The page title is near the top of the html code display and it can be changed directly by altering the code.
To see if your page has uploaded correctly you enter the address in the window of your browser. For Geocities the address will be of the form http://www.geocities.com/yourusername . You don't have to put /index.htm on the end. Provided that your index page has been done correctly you should see it from that address.
To link another page to your index page open index.htm in your html programme, select 'Insert' and then 'Hyperlink'. For free pages at Geocities you will be uploading all your pages to only one folder, or directory, as it is properly called, so the link doesn't need to specify what directory the extra pages are in. So, in the URL box just type the file name which you have chosen for the linking page. If, for example, you have decided to call it Page2, then in that box type Page2.htm. Note that, although when you save pages you mustn't add the file extension, when you programme a link on an html document you must. The ending for html pages is .htm so you need to get used to adding it. If you are linking to a compressed image file, with extension .jpg you must add .jpg to the file name. Other types of file have other extensions and all must be used to access them from your index.htm . File names, including extensions, can be upper case or lower case and some sites will not give access to a file if the link doesn't match exactly.
When links have been inserted into index.htm you upload the new version with the new pages.
If, in time, you are fortunate enough to see your site title or one of your page titles in the search results of a search engine and you click on the link they give you, you will actually be accessing the file held by your server using the file name. So whatever you see in those results is not actually the name used by the server to deliver the page. Similarly when you click on a link on your home page, however it appears, and it could be a picture link, the link is to a file name. That is the URL information you have programmed in after clicking Insert and then Hyperlink.
Reading these notes more than once will help to steer you through the steps required to programme your pages and your links with the minimum amount of frustration.
To use a picture as a link, first programme a hyperlink in the usual way and then place the cursor on it while still in the html programme. Click on the Insert command and Image, select the image from your folders and double click it. It will appear in the middle of the hyperlink. Delete the separated parts of the hyperlink and the image remains as the active link. Right click on the picture to examine its properties. You must upload that picture file to your server and check to see that the link from your page does not have anything extra in the path since, because you inserted the picture from another of your folders, quite likely, that path may have been added to the picture's file name and that information could cause the link to fail. It is better always to place a file in the same folder as the page it is to be used with before the Insert command is used. That should prevent any extra path information from being added - but still check.
Copyright©2001-2002Andrew Burbidge
andrew_burbidge@hotmail.com
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