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Techno-files
Building Web page a good family project

By Riley Gay

When you open Jack and Jill Mitchell’s website, the first thing you see is a smattering of text, peppered here and there with colored links. Abruptly, though, a picture starts to appear, revealing itself from top to bottom in a procession of colors and shapes.

It’s a photo of a child on a colorful plastic tricycle, smiling and waving for the camera. Soon more pictures appear--a beachscape with two tanned and smiling adults, along with the now-familiar child, and another showing a pastoral vista, backed by azure mountains.

Welcome to the Mitchell Family Web page.

This isn’t a business site. The Mitchells have nothing to sell. What they do have is something to share.

Not only are there photos of the family and an accounting of their recent vacation, intended mainly for friends and relatives, but links to some of the family’s favorite websites and one inviting comments from the site’s visitors.

Like many families and individuals, the Mitchells are making use of the worldwide aspect of the Internet as a kind of bulletin board to post a chronicle of their lives and interests.

Best of all, except for what they already pay for their Internet service, it didn’t cost them a thing.

And if you’re thinking that creating Web pages is a difficult task, requiring special skills and long hours at the computer, think again.

Authoring your own website is easier now than it’s ever been. In fact, with the right software, it can be point-and-click simple.

If you’re connected to the Internet, you probably already have a place reserved for you to put up your Web pages.

Nearly all Internet service providers make space available on their servers for their members’ websites.

If your ISP doesn’t there are a number of sites, such as Homestead (www.homestead.com), Yahoo! Geocities (geocities.yahoo.com), Freeservers (www.freeservers.com), and Tripod (www.tripod.com), that will host your website at no cost, in exchange for a bit of advertising space on your pages.

And the tools you need to create your site are easy, even fun, to use and are available at very little cost, or in some cases for free.

At both the Homestead and Geocities sites you can download free web-building software to your PC that will let you create your site.

Tripod takes a slightly different approach. You design your site in your Web browser using an online page editor from Trellix (www.trellix.com) called Web Express. A stand-alone version can be purchased from Trellix for around $70, if you prefer.

Most basic web-design tools offer templates or "themes" to make creating your Web pages a breeze.

You can place photos on your site using an inexpensive digital camera or flatbed scanner. Alternately, most film developers can put your images onto a CD-ROM. Putting them on your page is usually a simple drag-and-drop operation with most of these programs. Adding text to your page is as easy as typing it in.

If your design needs are more involved, though, or you're designing a site for your business, there are several good professional web editors from which you can choose.

If you’re using Microsoft Office Professional on your computer, you already may have one of the best, and easiest to use, programs in Front Page.

Also available as a separate product, Front Page is a full-featured program that will let you design a professional looking site, either from a template or from scratch, with a minimum of effort.

If price is no object, and you're willing to spend a little time to learn a slightly more complex program, check out Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Adobe's GoLive (both are around $300).

For most families and individuals, having their site on their ISP's server, with an address like "www.myISP.com/members/MySite", is probably just fine.

But if you're running an online business you need your own unique Web address, such as "www.mysite.com".

With several million Web addresses already in use, you'll first have to find out if the one you want is still available. At Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com) and Register.com (www.register.com) you can search a universal database at no cost, to see if the domain name you want for your site is still up for grabs.

If it is, you can register it for about $30 a year. They also will offer to host your site for a relatively modest monthly fee.

If you’ve been thinking about making your place within the worldwide Web community with your own site, or sharing your interests and hobbies online, getting the space and the tools you need may be as easy as turning on your computer.

The Mitchells did it; so can you.

Neighbor Riley Gay is Wrangler News’ director of technology services.

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