Your Place In Cyberspace

Do you want to create a free website for yourself on the Net? It's easy. Just open up Microsoft Word and type out your résumé. Instead of saving it as a Word document, save it as a web page. Make sure the file name is index. Next, go to Geocities.com and type your Yahoo! email/chat ID and password. When you are logged in, click on the Easy Upload link. Here, click on the Browse button, select the web page that you had created and click Upload. Log off and your website is ready to serve. If your email ID was johndoe@yahoo.co.in, then your website would be available at www.geocities.com/johndoe/.

Is it as simple as that? Yep. Will that bring your site millions of visitors every day? Nope. Creating a website is one thing and getting visitors is totally a different ball game. Creating, maintaining and promoting your website is something that will require lots of hard work and patience on your part. Here is how.

Why Do You Need A Home Page?

A home page is a personal statement. It is an avenue to showcase your creative efforts and interests to a global audience. It could be about subjects that interest you, which might interest others. It can make you famous or at least it could bring you contacts from the far corners of the earth. It is always cool to put a web address below the name in email communications.

What Is A Web Page?

A web page is a document that has hyperlinks and bookmarks. When you click on a hyperlink, you are immediately taken to a different location (bookmark) somewhere in the same page or on a different page. You can also integrate pictures and animations on a web page.

The most amateur among amateurs create web pages with a word processing program like MS Word. Slightly sophisticated people use a web page editor like Microsoft Frontpage. Both Word and Frontpage enable people, who don't know HTML, to quickly create web pages. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language that web pages use. Web page that use only HTML can be very drab, which is why other technologies such as Javascript, CSS, etc., are integrated with it. The web page then becomes more sophisticated and livelier. To learn the basics of HTML and these other web technologies, head over to PageTutor.com or W3Schools.com.

Creating Your Site

A lazy bird might simply hop off to Geocities and use one of the many different templates on offer there to create a web page. All you have to do is to choose a template, type some stuff about yourself, save it, and it's done. Others should create and test their web pages on their PCs first and then upload them to their site.

Not all the content that you want to put on your site would fit in a single page. This is why you divide the content in different pages. You may also create categories and group pages under them. You should also create a main page called the Home, which would link all the other pages or the main categories.

Your site's main logo and the different categories should be available on all pages and appear in the same places. This helps visitors to easily navigate your site. To add some real functionality to your website, make use of small pictures for the categories or links. Since visitors may not have the time to read every single word on your home page, pictures will serve them better. But don't go overboard with large images and garish colors - People may leave your site as fast as they had come.

Your Webspace Provider

Hosting providers like Geocities provide you with free web space. Because Geocities is part of Yahoo!, anyone with a Yahoo ID can immediately start a home page on Geocities. Geocities provides free listing in its member directory. This is probably your only chance of getting search engines to index your site.

Tips & Tricks

• Sometimes, it looks better to have images for hyperlinks. Use small gif or jpeg images for things like "Click Here" or "Go" or "Next".
  <a href="index.htm"> <img src="home.gif" border=0> </a>
• When using the ALT property for an image, keep the text short. If you do have to keep it long, then use carriage return and linefeed characters to separate the lines. <img src="home.gif" alt="First&#10;&#10;Second">
• While the ALT property can be used for images only, you can use the TITLE property for hyperlinks, table data cells, etc. <a title="Go to HOME" href="index.htm"> <img src="home.gif" border=0> </a>
• Internet Explorer supports 25 transition effects using meta tags (24 revealtrans and 1 blendtrans). The DURATION property describes how many seconds it will take to complete the effect. The TRANSITION property describes which actual effect your document will have, from 0-23. <meta http-equiv="Page-Enter" content="revealtrans(duration=2, transition=3)"> <meta http-equiv="Page-Enter" content="blendtrans(duration=2)">
• You can automatically push a web page to a visitor's machine after a certain number of seconds using the REFRESH meta tag. <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="120; url=newpage.htm">
• Make sure that all your pages have a link to your guest book. If you want to provide your email address on them instead, use the following code to prevent spam robots from picking up your email address. <a title="JohnDoe @ Yahoo.com" href="mailto:REMOVE_THIS_ JohnDoe@Yahoo.com ?subject=Query from << your name here >> regarding your site&body=(Please check this email's TO address) Dear John,">John Doe @ yahoo.com</a>
• Microsoft has introduced a special property called filter for use with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Though it works only with Internet Explorer, results are simply amazing.
• You can personalize your page to your visitors with the help of cookies. Learn all about cookies at CookieCentral.com.
• Javascript combined with HTML is touted as HTML with steroids. For some killer applications with JavaScript code, go to DynamicDrive.com.
• An amateur can always lower his ethics and steal code from websites. If you think some website has some smart code behind it, feel free to view the source and do some cutting and pasting. In IE, you will have to select Source from the View menu.
• When you write the content for the website, do not hard code the address of your web server in the links. Use relative links instead. This helps when you have to move your pages to a different server.

Geocites provides free site add-ons like Site Statistics, Guest Book, Yahoo! Presence, etc. Site statistics will tell you how many people visited your site on a monthly, daily, and hourly basis. It will also provide details about which search engines or websites had linked to you. It can even provide you with the keywords used by visitors in the search engines. Yahoo! Presence allows you to put a small image on your site that tells visitors whether you are online or not. If you had logged in using Yahoo! Messenger chat software, the image would tell visitors that you were online and that they could start chatting with you by clicking on the image.

For other webspace providers, visit WebHosts4Free.com. Before signing up with any webspace provider, take a good look at their Terms & Conditions. Providers like Geocities or Tripod are fine for people with limited computing skills. But for computer science students and professionals, sites like DomainDLX offer webspace with server-side scripting.

Enhancing Your Website

Put up a guest book on your site that visitors can sign and provide you feedback. With that, keep updating your site routinely with fresh content. Make sure there are no broken links. If, from the site statistics, you find that most people are heading towards a particular page on your site, then feature links to other pages on that page prominently.

Bravenet.com provides many freebies like page counters, discussion forums, etc. Page counter is an image with a number on it. Every time somebody visits your site, the number on the image is incremented. This will tell you how many people had visited your site. When you register with Bravenet, you are provided with a few lines of HTML code. All you have to do is to paste this code in your web page.

Similarly, Geobytes.com allows you to put a customized message on your site depending upon the geographical location in which your visitors lives. A person in New York visiting your site can be welcomed with a message like "Have a nice day in New York, US". All you have to do is take some HTML code as shown on their website and put it in your web page.

Promoting Your Site

The first thing you should do to promote your site is to ask your friends to visit it. Whenever you send an email, put the address of your website below your name. You can also ask an owner of a popular website or an Internet newsletter to provide a link to your website. This can bring in some traffic. Just make sure that your email to them contains proper English language and is devoid of words like "man" or "kewl".

Search engines are a great way to bring in visitors.^* Since the Google search engine is used by Yahoo, Netscape, AOL, MSN, Rediff, IndiaTimes, etc., it is important to submit your site's url to Google.com. Just type "add url" in Google and you will know what to do. Mere submission is no guarantee that Google will index your site. The best way to make sure that happens is to get a site that is already indexed by Google to provide a link to you. The more such outside links are there for your site, the better.

Google has something called PageRank (1 to 10) for grading websites. Just download the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and check the PageRank for prospective sites that might provide links to your site. Sites ranked higher on the toolbar offer better chances of your web pages getting indexed and even ranked.

Sometimes, in the event that you do get indexed, your site may not appear in the top 10 results for a combination of words. Just suppose that your site comes up at result #76 for the words chicken tikka. If you put the words chicken and tikka in the title of the page, you will find that after a few weeks, your page appears much earlier in the results. It also helps if you make liberal use of the same words that users might use with Google to visit sites such as yours. However, it will make no difference if you use words like free, computer, internet, etc.

Final Words

You can use your site and its following as a testimony to your skills. You can make your site bring you money. You can put up articles for sale. You can join affiliate sites like CJ.com^† and put ads on your site. Your home page could be a place where people could come together and collaborate on something useful. It could simply be a place where people could hang out and amuse themselves. Nothing could more gratifying than when someone from a faraway country contacts you with an email saying how much that he/she enjoyed your site. So, what are you waiting for? Go and hog some cyberspace!