Roger's Personal Homepage Page

Publishing on the World Wide Web

Many Internet Service Providers provide the facility for you to publish your own personal homepages, in which you can spout your own opinions, blow your own trumpet, advertise your own business, etc. to a (potentially) world-wide audience.

That is how these pages were produced, using BT Internet's new homepage facility.

Doing it the hard way!

Personal pages are easy to construct. All you need is a text editor and a knowledge of basic HTML. HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language, which is just ordinary text which contains lots of angle brackets and cryptic references to esoteric objects!

Alternatively, there are a number of editors which will do the donkey work for you, although you still need to know about the esoteric objects, if you want to produce a reasonably professional looking end result.

Doing it the easy way!

Simplest of all is to use a homepage wizard. These come in various shapes and sizes - and have varying level of complexity and sophistication - and enable pages to be produced which are only limited by the level of your personal creativity! Having created your HTML files, they have to be loaded into a designated area on your service provider's host computer, using a suitable file transfer program. It's not difficult, but each service provider has to provide the required access and information before you can start.

You may wish to follow up Compuserve or BT Internet for more details.

Where do you find goodies?

The most interesting pages - to look at, even if they don't contain useful information - contain fancy backgrounds, icons, buttons, pictures, etc. which require a great deal of work to build up from scratch. Most homepages are built by taking the things that other people have already designed, and adding to them or amending them for your own purposes. Having said that, many images are owned by people who guard them jealously, having invested time and/or money in creating them in the first place. All is not lost, because there are many sites which give away suitable images, and a few of these are listed below:-