By Carl Tenning
Tacoma Open Group for Microcomputers

Several providers still offer free Web Sites. Here are three web site hosting services that do:

Angelfire:

http://angelfire.lycos.com/

Yahoo! GeoCities:

http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/

Terra Lycos Tripod:

http://www.tripod.lycos.com/build/

Web pages are created by a language called HTML. It really is not so much of a language, but a set of instructions. However, most web-site hosting services have an automatic web authoring system where you only have to fill in a template to create a web page. The template automatically generates the HTML instructions, called tags. Alternatively, you can learn the HTML instructions and write your own web page. An HTML file is a pure text file except that the instructions for HTML are enclosed with the < and > characters. These are called tags. Carrage returns and extra space characters are ignored. Typing plain text will simply display the text without any formatting. What the HTML instruction tags do is to format the text, insert pictures, create links and so forth.

Here are some HTML examples:

<center>This text will be centered on the screen</center>

The <center> tag, of course, centers the text. For each tag there is usually a beginning tag and an end tag. The end tag starts with a slash character as you can see above.

Here is a tag that formats the text as a heading:

<h2>Heading Text</h2>

The number sets the size of the heading.

To display a picture, you use the following tags:

<img src="filename.jpg">

Notice that there is no end tag for this one, but you could center the picture by adding the center tags, e.g.

<center><img src="filename.jpg"></center>

To create paragraphs, you use the paragraph tags:

<p>Text text text etc. etc.</p>

There are many more HTML tags, but this gives you the idea.

The first page on your web site is usually given the file name "index.html". You can either create this file on a text editor and upload it to the hosting service, or create the file using their editor.

To find a list of HTML commands, search for "HTML" using Google. Here is one website that has links to HTML tags and tutorials:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/authoring/html_basics/

To send a picture to the hosting service you must first have it scanned into a JPG or GIF image file, or else get the picture with a digital camera. You then "upload" the image file to your hosting service. The largest pictures I use on a web site are 640X480. Anything larger than that takes too long to load. Try to keep the JPG file size around 50K. You can do this with image editing software to reduce the resolution to around 65%.