For Address, you have two choices: Either register your own domain (ie: Ciment.com) or piggyback on someone else's (ie: www.ciment.earthlink.com). Piggybacking is free; registering costs about $25-35 a year depending on the company you use. If you register your own domain, it will take a few days for the hosting of your domain to be transferred to a company such as earthlink or any other company. These companies will also handle the registration of your domain for you. So if you register a domain, you should expect the process of setting up your site to take about a week. When people type in your website address otherwise known as a URL (ie: www.globalthoughts.com), they will see your site's home page and not know or care who is the Host. 

For Hosting, you can either pay or get it for free from any of the ISP's or companies that provide such services. The catch may be that they will put some banner advertisements at the top of the screen for people looking at your page to see. 

As for Content, this memo will deal with the following items: (1) Creating a home page and other pages annexed to it including text files, graphics and links to other sites; (2) uploading your files to the Host. 

To Create a Home Page involves the same process as creating any other page. A Page is in essence a document file. It can have text, graphics and links on it. To begin to create a document, open up Netscape and open up the Page Composer part of the Netscape Communicator Program.  Now you can type text and use the control buttons to set the font, type size and insert bold, italic, justification etc. just as you do for any windows-oriented program. You should keep saving this page. Click on Save from the horizontal icon menu at the top third of the screen, give the file a name and save it and keep doing this every so often. Your home page, at the point you upload (send) it to the Host, will need to be titled "index.html" or some other name assigned to you by the Host. Every other page you create will have its own name, regardless of whether it is a text file that stands on its own as a text file or some other page that you compose using Page Composer. Remember that if you link from page to page, you have to tell the link the name of the page document file you are linking to. Example: You create a home page (default.html) and you link to a page of family photos you composed which you call family.html. The link will be to family.html. If on the family page you link back to the home page, you will be linking to default.html. 

To insert a graphic onto the page, first create the graphic file and save it either to your hard drive or network drive. The next paragraph is a digression for some prerequisites to this point. 

Some discussion about graphics and scanning: The graphic file can, for example, be something you scan (ie: a photo) or something attached as a part of e-mail you received. Nowadays, it is commonly an image created by a digital camera. If you are dealing with scanned images, skip the next paragraph. Output from digital cameras tend to be large-size files that don't transfer well, especially to those who have to look at your site with dial-up connections. Also, many of these digital cameras have their own proprietary software and the digital images look a bit contorted using any other software. This seems to be the biggest challenge facing people today in this area. After a lot of tinkering, I found via the NY Times a great program by Novatix.com called Send Photos Gold. It costs about $20. You can mark photos from your PC's hard drive, add captions and a headline, and send it out as if it were e-mail. The quality of the pictures is perfect, there are many options to make the page look pretty, and the file size is significantly reduced. You can also save the resultant photo essay as an HTML file and post the whole page on the Internet. Using the program, compose your photo essay and then, when finished, instead of e-mailing it, click on Export to HTML. Save the document and remember the directory where you saved the folder. When you upload to your site, remember to upload both the folder (along with the files in it) and the html file which will have the same name as the folder and will reside one level below the folder on your drive. (The program automatically creates this file when it creates the folder. You must upload both in order for the page to be readable.) It is much faster to do this with your digital pictures than to try and scan them or to play with Netscape Composer to do this. The only problem is if you want to insert a link at the bottom of the page to another page. To do this, you have to edit code, and it is a bit of a trick beyond the scope of this article. However, it can be done, because once you have saved an HTML document, you can always open it and edit it using a Microsoft Accessory utility such as Word Pad, and you can get technical support from Novatix on it for free. Once you do this with one document, you can just copy the code from one page to another and change the appropriate link words. As an example, you would be working with a line of code that reads and it basically contains the link along with the words people see when they look at the webpage (ie: Continue to St. Petersburg.) This is not hard to do, and Novatix will tell you where to insert the link. Or you can download one of my pages with a photo essay on it, such as globalthoughts.com/stpetersburg.html and then look for the appropriate code for you to copy and paste almost at the very end of the code of that page. It looks like this:

<a href="http://www.globalthoughts.com/stpetersburg.html">Continue to St. Petersburg.</a>
              <TBODY>
 

If you still intend to scan photos, it is best to create files in "file name".jpg format and the DPI resolution should be about 100. Since there are many types of scanners out there, it does me no good to tell you how to scan images and create such files but there are scanners out there for $150 that come with photo scanning and editing (ie: cropping and adjusting brightness and contrast) software that will do just fine and my best advice is to buy the scanner as a peripheral from the same vendor that sold you the computer so that the vendor cannot pass the buck if you have problems installing the scanner and getting it to work with your computer. Also, the person who sold you the computer (ie: Micron or Dell) will know the specifications of your PC so that he sells you a compatible scanner. The first scanner I bought from a store and it was not compatible; the second I bought from Micron who sold me the PC and it installed fine the first time. 

Once you have a graphics file, go to Page Composer and insert the cursor to the place in the document you want the graphic to go. Now click on "Image" from the horizontal menu bar at the top third of the screen. From "image location" go and browse through your PC or network and locate the file you want and click on "open" and then OK. Now, to adjust the size of the graphic, right-click on the graphic and then select "image properties" and then go to "dimensions" and enter in some number that is higher or lower than the one listed there. If you change one dimension (ie: horizontal), the other one (ie: vertical) will be changed proportionately automatically. Then choose OK. In "dimensions" you can make other decisions about the graphic such as where text should go around the graphic. Now that your graphic is inserted, your cursor will be at the end of the graphic. Hit Return/Enter to go to the next line and continue with more text or another graphic. 

To create a Link: Type text. Now highlight the text as if you were going to copy or paste it. Click on Link from the horizontal icon menu at the top third of the screen. Choose the file to which you want to link. If you want to link to a site on the internet, type http://www.domainname.com or whatever it is. If you want to link to a text file, browse through your PC or network and find the document and select it. Be aware of the following: Once you upload onto the Host, your Link should not point toward your C drive or the network but only to the other document so therefore the way to do this is to decide now what the name of the document file will be called and just to write that file name into this space when you are asked to tell Page Composer's Link menu where to Link. The simplicity here is all you have to do is to type in the name of the file and add .html to the name. No need to put any symbols such as slashes or periods before the file name. So let's say the text file will be called ivan1.html. That's what you write in the space provided. 

Test Your Work: If you want to make sure you are doing this right, create a link to a document on your C drive and when in Link mode, browse to the C drive and select the document or graphic file. Save the page you are working on. Now, from Composer select Preview from the horizontal icon menu bar and you will simulate the Netscape Browser function. Now go to the link and click on it. It should take you to the text file you linked to. You can only use this Preview function as long as you link to items within your computer or network. It won't work once you start assigning file names to Links that don't include the "path" of your computer on it (after all, if you just write default.html, how does your browser or computer know where to look for the document). The reason you are doing it this way will become clear when Uploading is discussed later. 

This paragraph repeats something told to you earlier: Remember that if you link from page to page, you have to tell the link the name of the page document file you are linking to. Example: You create a home page (default.html) and you link to a page of family photos you composed which you call family.html). The link will be to family.html. If on the family page you link back to the home page, you will be linking to default.html. 

To create the text file itself: The issue here is saving the document correctly. Obviously I don't need to tell you how to create a word processor document. Word Perfect 7 and above, and Microsoft's Office 97 and above allow you to save text files in HTML format. Your file must be both saved in HTML format and must end with file name .html. Make sure when you save the file, that the name of the file matches exactly the name of the link to which the home page is being directed. If it doesn't, the home page won't send the person there. 

Before you upload all your pages and files to the Host, you need to install an FTP (file transfer protocol) program. One that I am using and which is said to be both easy to use and download is called Leap FTP and it can be obtained for free from www.download.com. for a 30 day trial period. Go to that page, enter in Leap FTP in the Quick Search and download. Your Host will tell you where to direct the FTP program, and the program when run will look for your host and your host will ask you to enter in your user name and password in order to get inside the Host's computer by connecting via modem or whatever communications set up you have so that you can send files to your site, delete files already sent, and rename or replace files on the site. You can customize Leape to memorize your Host's "address" and to enter your user name and password so that you just bring up Leap and click on your web site's name and then all that's left to do is to upload your files. To customize Leap, go to the Site Manager, click on the Personal Sites folder at left, and click on Add Site. Now fill in the form. Your Site Label can be anything you want it to be; your user name and password are what the Host tells you, and the address for webjump is ftp.webjump.com Select the options to log in "normal" and transfer type "auto-detect". 

To Upload: Once you have your FTP program running and you are logged on to the Host, on the left side of your screen is a list of which files are in your computer. Locate the files you want to send and then highlight them (you can highlight more than one by hitting "control") and click on the various files. Then drag one of the files to the right side of the screen. Then a box will ask you if you want to upload all the selected files. If so, then say yes and watch the show meaning wait until the upload is finished. Once it is, you should immediately be able to go to your browser and look at your home page and all your other pages linked to it just like anyone else. 

Remember that you must upload each graphic file separately. A page that has links to graphics files will not send the graphics as well. So if you have a page of family photos (ie: family.html) with 3 photos (photo1.jpg, photo2.jpg and photo3.jpg) you will send 4 files to the server. 

You can upload all kinds of files, such as .mpg and .swf files (flash, music and videos). Remember that not everyone has the same kind of media player so you may either need to have the file in several formats or include an instructions page explaining what kind of media player is necessary to read the given file and insert a link telling people where to go to download it.

Editing Your Site: You can later delete or rename files sent to the host's server computer by right-clicking on the file and then hitting "rename" or "delete". If you want to replace a file on the host's server, delete it and upload the edited file from your computer. So, for example, if you want to edit your home page, edit it on Composer, save the file; delete the file from the host and upload the edited file. 

And that, as promised, is how to set up and maintain your web site in 3 pages or less.