Copyright ©2001 Richard Seltzer
Now that the rights have reverted to the author, he is free to update and revise this online version. Please send email him your feedback/comments at seltzer@samizdat.com
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Stop! Don't run away scared. There are lots of Web hosting services that will give you free space where you can post your pages. And if you can create a document in Word, you can create Web pages -- simply and easily, using the same software you already use every day.
This is a very important exercise. Don't just read this chapter. Act on it.
If you make your own personal Web pages and put them together in your own site and then let the world know about your site, you'll begin to understand what your company could and should do, and what's really involved. You'll be in a much better position to talk to the technical staff and let them know what you need and why. And you'll also be better able to judge the amount of work involved, and what you should be willing to pay for such work.
If all you do is type plain text (leaving fancy details to support staff), that's fine. The words, not the formatting, are what really matter on Web pages because of the free traffic search engines can bring to your site. You can learn how this works using Web pages that you create on your own.
If you want to control the look and feel of your pages (the layout, fonts, etc.) rather than leaving that up to the choice of the user, and if you use Word 2000, then all you'll need to do to get the same effects on a Web page as you do in your Word document is simply to save your file as an ".html document" or a "Web page."
Even if you are a Webmaster for a major corporation, you should create personal Web pages to experiment with -- free of corporate procedures and constraints. Later you might want to adapt techniques that you learn on your own for corporate use.
You could do a site devoted to your family, your hobby, your club, a
family-member's team, a family-member's little business, or a non-profit
organization. What matters is that you create a set of pages, each of which
does a necessary job, and all of which work together to produce results.
For suggestions, see my article "Okay, I have Web space. Now what am I
going to put there?" at www.samizdat.com/soc3.html.
Today, most ISPs (including AOL) offer their customers free Web
space -- typically 10-50 Mbytes. (10 is enough room for about 30 copies
of Huckleberry Finn). You can also go to sites that specialize in providing
free Web space, such as Xoom (now part of nbci.com), Geocities (now part
of Yahoo), Tripod (now part of Lycos), and Angelfire.
In many cases, in exchange for the "free service", ads will appear on your pages; and/or you'll be saddled with a variety of limitations -- like having to use the templates provided by the service.
And unless you pay a premium to have your own domain name (e.g. www.samizdat.com), your Web address will be of the form members.xoom.com/rseltzer. And you will probably be assessed charges for your "free" space if your pages turn out to be popular and attract significant traffic (measured in the amount of information transferred in the course of a month -- a typical limit is around 1 gigabyte, which is a lot of text, but very little in terms of sound or video files).
But the prices for some professional Web hosting services -- without limitations -- are quite low -- in the range of $10 to $20/month.
When shopping for a service, keep in mind that you want the ability
to create pages on your own, without templates and without databases. Beware
of page creation "wizards". You want to be in control of what you create
and how it looks both to individuals and to search engines. You also want
to be able to transfer files to the Web server using "ftp" (file transfer
protocol) from your PC or "fetch" from you Macintosh. To do the page creation
and Web promotion activities recommended in this lesson and the next one,
you are going to need that kind of flexibility.
Unless you work for a large company that runs its own Web servers,
before making or recommending significant changes in your Web site you
should check to find out the limitations and charges imposed by your hosting
service.
For instance, you may be charged based on how much disk space you use or may only be able to use up to a certain limited amount of disk space for your Web files. You also may be charged for the traffic to your site (measured in gigabytes transferred per month).
You need to keep these factors in mind when deciding what to do to improve your Web site. For instance, if you are going to go to great lengths to improve your traffic, you need to know if that's going to significantly affect your costs.
Also, now is a good time to reconsider your long-term Web plans. As more and more Web users get high-speed connections (cable and DSL), you might want to add lots of graphics, audio, and video. But keep in mind that multimedia files take up far more space than text. A novel the size of Huckleberry Finn takes up about 300 Kbytes, and a minute or two of just audio (time to read just a couple pages of text) would take up that same space. If you are limited to 50 Megabytes by your Web host, a short video clip or two could use up all your space. And every time a visitor accesses one of those large files, you get charged not just for the visit, but for the number of bytes involved. Some commercial Web hosts offer a base of 1 gigabyte of transfers per month, and charge for more than that. If you have reasonable traffic and multimedia content, you could easily pass that base line in a few days.
Keep in mind that other reasonably priced Web hosting services (e.g.,
$10 to $20/month) have no limits on Web space or on traffic. This might
be a good time to consider your options. As long as you have your own domain
name, moving your Web business to another host can be relatively quick
and easy. And so long as the hosting service provides 24x7 support and
a toll-free help number, it doesn't really matter how far away they are
physically located. (I recently switched from an ISP that is nearby in
Massachusetts to www.hispeed.com in California. The transition was smooth,
taking just a couple days; and now I have unlimited Web space to experiment
with.)
In this lesson we are going to focus on the simplest and most effective
type of Web page -- static pages with lots of text.
Today's Web is based on text. Yes, there are interesting audio, video, and graphics there as well, but the heart of the Web is still text. Text is what search engines find, and search engines are the primary way people find Web pages. Plain text pages can be viewed with any browser. They load very quickly. They take up a minimum of disk space. And they involve small data transfers (if you are limited or are charged for traffic.)
Also, keep in mind that the Web is global, and plain text is easy for your foreign visitors to translate automatically for free through services like babelfish.altavista.com.
Text is also easily accessible by the blind, who use non-graphic browsers and text-to-voice conversion devices.
And text pages are easy to create and edit. You can do it yourself or
you can teach other people in your company to do it. No technical skills
are required.
Whatever software you use to create your pages, the two most essential
elements are the HTML title and the hyperlinks (links).
HTML title.
Every Web page (document) has at least three names:
First, you assign a file name to the document on your PC and, for simplicity, you should use that same file name on the Web server. These file names should end with .htm or .html, and when you save these files from Word, you need to be sure to save them as "html document" or "Web page".
For example, on your PC, you might name a file c:\web\resume.html. Then when you move it to your Web server, the URL (Web address) of that page will be the domain name or directory (folder), followed by a forward slash and the file name. For instance, http://www.samizdat.com/resume.html or http://members.xoom.com/rseltzer/resume.html (Note: Microsoft uses backward slashes \ in file names. The Web uses forward slashes /.)
Second, you should give the text on your page a headline -- like you would any article. The headline appears in large type and in bold at the top of the page and tells what is most important on this page, often using clever and intriguing wording, meant to encourage the visitor to read on.
Third, and most important is the HTML title. This title should also say what's most important on the page, but without the cleverness -- just tell it straight. The HTML title does not appear directly on a Web page. It is part of the header information in the code. When you go to a Web page the HTML title appears above the tool bars of your Web browser in small type (you might not even notice it). But when you do a search at a search engine, the HTML title appears as THE title in the list of results, the words that are linked to the pages that match your query. HTML titles are also the most important part of a page for search engine ranking -- determining which pages appear near the top of a results list. If the words in a query appear in the HTML title, rather than just randomly in the text of a page, that page gets high priority.
We'll talk about the mechanics below (how to add an HTML title varies from one version of Word to another). But you should always include an HTML title, and choose those words very carefully. Do not use all upper case -- some search engines are case sensitive. It's best to use lower case except for words that are always capitalized.
You might also want to prefix each HTML title with a word that helps identify your site. That will make your pages stand out in bookmark/favorite lists. (e.g., Kensbikes mountain biking tips; Kensbikes fixing bicycle brakes)
Hyperlinks
Links connect one Web or one part of a Web page with another. They are a shortcut for having to type in the entire URL. The highlighted words you click on to go from page to page are links.
You will want to have links connecting your various pages -- referring people who read one page to related information on another page, also referring people who found a page in the middle of your site to your home page and/or a sitemap or table of contents for your site. (NB -- thanks to search engines, most people will not come to your site by way of your home page. They will come to the specific page that had the content that matched their query. Hence all your pages should let visitors know the context of what they are seeing, telling them where they are and how to navigate elsewhere in your site.)
You should try to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get to what they want quickly, without having to click repeatedly. If you have a sitemap page with links to every page at your site, and if every page has a link to your sitemap page, than visitors should be able to go from any page to any other page in just two clicks.
In general, large pages are far more useful and valuable that small ones. Search engines tend to give them more weight (ranking), and they are easier for visitors to print, than if the same content were divided up into many small pages. If you have a large page (dozens of typed pages long), you can include a table of contents at the top, with internal links (which Microsoft calls "bookmarks") to different sections.
You also can/should include links to complementary sites that have related
information (and ask the Web masters of those sites to link back to you).
If you know Word, you already know how to handle all the cosmetics
of simple Web pages. The same functions for headlines, bold, italic, underlining,
ragged right, justified right, bullets, numbered bullets, and horizontal
lines work just fine -- whether you create your document as an html document
to begin with or you create it as a normal Word document and convert it
to html. You can even insert pictures into your Web pages just as you do
into your Word documents.
About five years ago, Microsoft came out with a great software patch
-- the Internet Assistant and made it available for free from their Web
site. You could download this software and on installation it would modify
you copy of Word 6.0 or Word for Office 95 so you could use it to create
Web pages -- simple and powerful pages, with all the most important features,
and no frills. It was easy to learn and easy to use.
Then when they incorporated Web authoring directly in Word for Office 97, they moved everything around, so you had to hunt and battle to figure out where they had hidden the most important features. And while you could edit a page created with Word for Office 95 in 97, you could not edit one from 97 in 95.
Now with Word 2000 they have totally revamped the software. Their underlying assumption seems to be that people love complexity and want to totally control the look and feel of their pages (while the underlying assumption of the Web is that the viewer -- whose screen is going to display the page -- should have control over the lock and feel). Important functions that used to be highlighted in the toolbars have been moved around and buried so it's a challenge to find them. And the software automatically adds enormous amounts of superfluous formatting code -- making files far larger than necessary. Whereas before, with a rudimentary familiarity with HTML, you could View Source and make some minor adjustments in the code; now that's virtually impossible, unless you are a pro. And once you've edited a page with Word 2000, you've rendered it totally useless in Word for Office 97 or 95. (Whatever version you have now, sooner or later market pressures orchestrated by Microsoft will eventually force you to upgrade; so it's important to keep these considerations in mind).
On the positive side, if you love Word, you'll love the kinds of Web pages you can create with Word 2000. Even footnotes convert easily and automatically, all appearing at the end of the page, automatically generating links from the footnoted point in the text to the footnote itself and then back again to that same point in the text. Create the document the way you want in Word, then click File, Save As, give it a File name: that ends in .htm or .html, and in Save as type: select Web page (second in the list, just under Word document). The conversion to HTML happens automatically, and your tool bars change, giving you Web-only options that you didn't see before.
Like it or not, Word is today's de facto standard for word processing.
So we have to live with it.
Word 6.0 and Word for Office 95
If you use an old version of Word, you will need to download and install a piece of software before you can start to make your own Web pages. But don't despair. Once you have taken care of that quick installation, you will be much better off than folks with more recent, less useful versions of Word.
Go to AltaVista (www.altavista.com) and enter the query wdia204z.exe. That's the file name of the "Internet Assistant," a free piece of software that modifies your version of Word so it can handle the .HTML format of Web pages. It was originally available from Microsoft. Then Microsoft dropped it from their site and hundreds of other sites made it available. Now it's back at Microsoft again. The search should take you right to the page you need for the download and the installation instructions.
If you are creating a document from scratch, start a new document and immediately save it as HTML Document (File, then Save As, then select from the drop down menu next to Save as type:). If you are starting with an existing document, just open it in Word, save it as an HTML document, and the software will automatically convert it to the new format. In either case, give the file a name with .htm as the suffix (not .html) Both .htm and .html work fine for the Web. Browsers will treat files with either of those names just the same. But this version of Word was limited to file extensions that are just three characters long.
All your basic formatting should convert easily or you can add it to your document using the usual Word commands. But don't try from footnotes and fancy effects. If those kinds of things are important to you, you should invest in Word 2000.
Once your document is saved in HTML format, you will see a new set of commands in your tool bar. The two that are unique to Web pages and essential to you are represented by icons: the letter "i" for the HTML title, a picture of a chain for creating links, and a picture of an open book for making "bookmarks" (internal links).
For the title, simply click on the "i", type in your title, and click OK.
For links, highlight the text that you would like to link to by clicking once and dragging your cursor over it, then click on the chain icon. You will see the text you highlighted (and can edit it) in the line marked Text to Display: Enter the URL (Web address, in its complete form, such as http://www.samizdat.com) that you want to link to in the box labeled "File or URL:" If you are linking to the same pages repeatedly, you can save a little time by clicking on the down arrow to see what you have entered recently, and clicking on the address you want. To link to an Internet email address instead of to a Web page, enter the address preceded by mailto:, such as mailto:seltzer@samizdat.com
Microsoft uses the word "bookmark" to mean internal links, or links to locations within the same page. That's confusing (perhaps deliberately so) for people who use Netscape as a browser, and think of "bookmarks" as saved links to pages you'd like to go back to (which Microsoft calls "favorites"). To create such an internal link, first click once at the point in the document you would like to able to return to easily (such as a chapter or section title). Then click on the open book icon, type an arbitrary name (one word, consisting of letters, not numbers), and click on Add. Then highlight the words that you like to make the link from (for instance the reference to that chapter/section in a table of contents at the top of the page), click on the chain icon, and enter the name of your "bookmark" in the line labeled Bookmark Location in File:
That's all you need to know.
Word for Office 97
If you have Word for Office 97, either open an existing document or start a new document and save it as HTML Document, with either .htm or .html as the file extension. (This version of Word can handle four-letter extensions).
The tool bar changes, but this time only one of the three key commands has its own icon -- this time a chain link superimposed on a globe.
To assign an HTML title, you have to click File, then Properties, then enter the title on the Title: line, and click OK.
To create a bookmark (internal link), first click once at the point on the document that you would llike to be able to return to easily; then click on Insert, then Bookmark, enter the name (one word, consisting of letters, not numbers), and click Add.
To create links, highlight the text that you want people to click on by clicking once and dragging your cursor over it. Then click on the chain/globe icon, and enter the full URL (Web address, such as http://www.samizdat.com). If you want to link to another place in the same page, in the line labeled "Named location in file" enter the name of the "Bookmark" you created, or click Browse and select that bookmark from the list you see. Click OK to finalize what you've done. To link to an email address, enter mailto: followed by the address.
Word 2000
Word 2000 is overcharged with automation, which some users will appreciate, and others will find very annoying.
The toolbar remains constant in this version. Regardless of whether you are creating a Web page or a Word document, you will see the chain/globe icon that is used for creating hyperlinks. In fact, if you start typing a Web address (with the characteristic @ sign) or a URL (starting either with http:// or with www.), this version will highlight that address automatically and automatically make it into a link. If, like me, you find that annoying, you can shut that feature off by clicking on Tools, then Autocorrect, then under the tab for "Autoformat as You Type," remove the check mark next to "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks" under "Replace as you type," and under the tab for Autoformat also remove the check mark next to "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks" under "Replace".
When you save a page (File, Save as), the second item in the drop down menu of file types is "Web page (.htm, .html)". Be sure to give you document a file name with either .htm or .html as the extension.
To create an HTML title, click on File, then Properties, and under the tab Summary enter your title on the Title line and click OK.
To mark the site for an internal link (bookmark), first click once at the place in the text you want to return to, then click Insert, Bookmark, and enter the name (one word, just letters, no numbers).
To create links, with your cursor, highlight the text to be linked, then click on the link/globe icon. Your selected text should appear in the top line (Text to display). To link to a Web page, you can enter that address in the line marked "Type file or Web page name," or click on an address that you have used in the past in the list that appears, or if you have a live connection to the Internet, click on "Web page..." That last option will launch your Web browser. Go to the page that you want to link to, minimize that browser window and the URL of that page will automatically appear in the URL box (that's a good way to avoid typos when linking to pages with long URLs). To link to a location in the same document (bookmark), highlight the words where you want the link to start (for instance in a table of contents), click on Bookmark, then click on the name of the bookmark which you have assigned to the target location. To create a link to an email address, click on email address in the lower left corner, then either type in the address (and the software will automatically add "mailto:" or click on an address from the list of suggestions.
Yes, you can do many more things that are fun and eye-catching. But
this is all you need to know to create effective Web pages, pages that
people can easily find and easily access from anywhere, with any browser.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details.
This book (plus three other Internet business books and numerous related articles) is available on CD ROM for $19. Check our online store at http:/store.yahoo.com/samizdat
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