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Beginners Tutorial
Part 2 - Software & The First Page
Which Software?
There are several popular WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors for creating web sites. As was explained int he last part, a WYSIWYG editor allows you to build a website without having to learn HTML. There are several free programs on the market and some very expensive ones.
Software You Must Pay For
The strange thing about web design software is that it is usually either free or highly expensive. Some of the expensive software are Microsoft FrontPage 2000 and Macromedia Dreamweaver. These are two of the most popular programs for building websites. Both cost over £100 ($160) to buy though. For more information on these visit Macromedia or Microsoft. If you are building your first website you probably don't want to spend a lot of money so you should consider the free software.
Free Software
There are 2 main free web design packages available. They are both very good and should be good enough for most people's needs. Microsoft FrontPage Express is the most popular and comes free with Internet Explorer and Windows 98. Netscape Composer is the other widely used software and it comes free with Netscape Communicator. For more information visit Microsoft or Netscape.
Creating The First Page
This is the part everyone loves! Creating the first page of your site. I will show you how to do this here. For this tutorial I have used Microsoft FrontPage/FrontPage Express and Netscape Communicator to show you what to do.
Step 1 - The Software
When you first run the program you will get a screen with icons along the top and a blank area nearly filling the screen just like in a standard word processor.
FrontPage Screenshot | Netscape Screenshot
Step 2 - Title
First you will want to add a title to your page. Click the center button on the toolbar ( button in FrontPage, can be found by clicking on the alignment button  in Netscape Composer) change the text size to 6 (the equivalent of 24pt), choose the font 'Arial' and the color red. Enter the title you want at the top of the page e.g.
Welcome To My Page
Step 3 - Body Text
Press enter to get onto the next line to enter the body text of your page. Change the font size to 4 (14pt), the text color to black and the alignment to left. Then type the text like you would in any word processor. You must remember to stick to standard fonts for your text, though, as someone must have the font installed on their computer to be able to view it.
Step 4 - E-mail Link
Finally you want to give the people who visit your site a way to give you feedback. At the bottom of your page add text like:
For more information e-mail me
Then highlight the text 'e-mail me'. You can put a hyperlink on this which will open up the user's mail program and address a new message to you. To do this click on the hyperlink button ( in FrontPage and  in Netscape Composer). In the box type:
mailto:your@emailaddress.here
and click OK.
Your page will now look something like this:
FrontPage Screenshot | Step 5 - Saving The Page
Now you will need to save the page for future reference. Go to File, Save As... Give the file a name and click OK. You can now open this file and look at it using your browser.
Part 3
In the next part you will learn how to insert images into your page, change the background color, add background images, change the page title and create hyperlinks.
©
1999 - 2001 David Gowans
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