Anita Bora
Let us begin at the beginning: First, how familiar are you with the Internet? Even if you are not absolutely green, it is a good idea to familiarise yourself with the ground.
Thankfully, there is a lot of excellent material available on the Net itself. From 'online dictionaries' to the history of the Web, there is enough to make you feel at home with the complete new set of terminology you are about to encounter.
Identifying a place to build on
Owning a domain name, example: http://www.my-name.com, and maintaining it on your own computer is going to cost you a neat packet. Since this is a guide for the freeloaders, we will only concentrate on free hosting service ;-)
There are a lot of services today that will host your own little cyber home for free. But some research will be called for to decide on the one best suited to your needs.
The first question that you can ask yourself is: What is going to be the purpose of my home page? Next: What do I plan for it in the near future?
Depending upon the frequency of updates to your pages and the amount of disk space your site will take you can shortlist a few good hosting sites. Some of the most popular among free homepage providers today are Tripod, Yahoo! Geocities, Angelfire, Homestead, Fortunecity and, of course, Rediff.
Most of these services enable you to quickly and conveniently create Web sites without any HTML or programming skills! Visit the individual sites to find out what they offer in terms of space and extras like a photo scanning facility, polls and guest books.
The downside of free hosting sites are few but just for the record, here they are…
1. Limited space: Tripod offers up to 50 MB, but most others offer from 12-20 MB.
2. Advertisements and those annoying windows popping up on your home page.
3. No hi-tech stuff to show off those heavy-duty programming skills.
Your Web site URL will have a name like members.rediff.com/~yournickname, if not something worse. But, hey, you dare not groan, it all for free :) A good idea here would be to use a redirection service, like V3-The Internet Identity Company . Offers urls like http://come.to/yourname or http://go.to/yourname. All visitors to these will be redirected to your homepage members.rediff.com/~yournickname.
Get set go…
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Links: Free HTML beginner's guides
Free Web Page Provider Review : The Free Webpage Provider Review is a searchable directory of free webspace, email and miscellaneous service providers. Over 162 free web space providers have been indexed in 21 countries.
Another site to check out is WebHostGuide (http://www.WebHostGuide.Com). This one pinpoints a hosting service ideal for your use from the many companies offering server space for personal or business sites.
Name Zero
Freeservers
Geocities
Tripod
Angelfire
Rediff
Homestead
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Where do you begin? That depends on where you are right now. No, I'm not talking about your career graph or your geographical location, but your Web exposure. Though most free hosting sites have tools that let you build pages without any knowledge of computer programming or HTML, the language for writing pages, it will not harm you to pick up some skills. I am sure some of you are adventurous enough to want to actually do your own thing. So begin with equipping yourself with some knowledge of HTML.
But, I can't write!
For people who cannot put two words together, there is no need to despair. You can always surf around a little and collect enough information for your pages. If your hobby is collecting and making candles, visit a lot of sites on that topic. Then compile all the information, rewrite it a little and guess what, no one will ever know where it all came from ;-) This is the beauty of free, unlimited information! If you want to badly talk about something and have nothing to say, give lots of links. Some sites even offer banners that generate content for you. All you need to do is place their banner somewhere on the page.
There are also sites that teach you how to make the most of your online presence, so if you don't really have anything to say but still want to sound important, these interactive tools will generate the fluff you need.
For those of you who have a conscience left, head here for some help on how to dot the i's and cross the t's. Take a few tutorials, brush up your grammar and hone your writing skills and you're all set for some killer headlines and crisp copy. And what should I write about, you might ask?
Whatever, you want really. Some people like to treat their homepage as a chronicle of their lives, while others prefer to use it to sell themselves to prospective employers. Or you can decide to be different and write on your pet fetish - the art of watching fishes in an aquarium, without dying of boredom.
Just remember that you will be offering the fare to browsers, so try and keep it entertaining; you know the attention span of this strange species! If you're doing a site on the physiology of white rats, don't wonder after three months as to why no one is visiting it! Yet, just about anything will do, it's your space after all!
