creat your web pages

Create Your Web Pages Now that you have an idea of what makes a good web site and you have planned out what you want to put your site lets look at what it takes to actually create your web site. If you have come to this page first, you would probably get more out of this tutorial if you read it from the beginning. Click here to go to the first page of this tutorial.

Web Pages the Easy Way But Not the Best Way

If you have know how to use a word processor like Microsoft Word or Corel Word Perfect than you can create your web site as easy as creating a document! Simply create your page as you normally would in your word processor making sure to include hyperlinks to other pages in the site. When your finished, simply save it as an html document. Here is what the bottom of the FILE > SAVE AS menu looks like in Microsoft Word 2000.



Easy enough, so why doesn't everyone create their web pages this way? This is not a good way to create web pages for several reasons.

1. The html created by your word processor is not optimized for the web, it is designed to preserve the formating of your word processor document. This means that the pages created by your word processor may look find in some browsers (Internet Explorer for example) but maybe not others (Netscape Communicator).
2. It is difficult to manage a site, or create optimized images. Your word processor is simply not set up for this.

Creating Your Web Pages, A Better Way

Most web pages are created with software designed to create web pages. This software creates and edits HTML files. HTML (Hyper Text Mark Up Language) is the type of file your web browser (i.e. Explorer or Netscape) know how to read.

Do you need to know HTML? Not really. Although it is helpful. Many web site design programs work like a word processor. You place your text and photos on the page and the program will save your work in HTML format. This type of web site design program is know as a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) web site editor. Examples of this are Microsoft FrontPage, Hot Metal Pro, Symantec Visual Page and on the professional end Adobe Go Live and Macromedia Dreamweaver. For pure HTML editing there are some excellent programs such as Homesite (for Windows) and BBE (for the Mac).

If you want to get your feet wet without spending any money, try the free web design tool that comes with your Netscape Browser called Netscape Composer.

For more information on what software to use click here.

Image Editing and Manipulation

Most web pages consist of images and text. You will need some type of software that allows you to size images and save them in a file format that your web browser can understand.

Both Netscape and Explorer understand at least two image formats. JPEGs and GIFs. Both of these image types is compressed in order to reduce the size of their file so you wait seconds instead of minutes for them to load on your web page. GIFs are ideal for line art, illustrations, and text that has been "rendered" as an image. JPEGs are ideal for photographs. For best results, it is important that you become familiar with these file formats. For more information, see our section on Optimizing Images on the Web .

There are many programs that allow you to manipulate images and save them as GIFs and JPEGs for the web. For the beginner, you can use Adobe Photo Deluxe or Paint Shop Pro. For the professional, use Adobe Photoshop (version 5.5 or later) or Macromedia Dreamweaver. There are also several freeware or shareware programs available. You can find many of these at Winfiles.com .

Coming Soon.. Another Alternative On-Line Web Building

Acquired Knowledge Systems is planning on featuring an on-line web site design system that will allow you create web pages directly in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. We plan on offering this service to all of our web hosting and Internet access account customers , without additional charge.

For those planning on doing e-commerce we are going to offer an on-line web store builder.