First some background...

Web pages are put together using a language called HTML which stands for Hyper Text Marked Language. It's really just regular text with some added codes ( called tags) which your browser finds and uses to format the page on your screen. It's actually so simple that you could just use any text editor to type up your pages and add the codes; it would work but would take more than 60 minutes to learn and put together...

Instead, there are tools out there which will allow you to type up a web page without having to worry about those tags.

Where to find these tools...

On your own computer.  Simple isn't it ?  well hopefully I'm right...   the truth is that Netscape comes with  Composer a simple program which lets you create web pages and chances are that you already have it on your computer ready to go...  If you don't like Netscape and use Microsoft Internet Explorer,  until recently it came with the equivalent to Composer, called Front Page Express. Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer offers FP Express but if you have a slightly older version of Exporer, you probably have it on your system.

So go into your Start / Program menu and look around in all those unused programs for either Front Page Express or Netscape Composer; you should find them respectively in Internet Explorer or Netscape folders.

If you don't, and because as mentioned FP Express is no longer available,  you're going to have to download Netscape but don't worry, Explorer and Netscape can happily live together on your computer.... you can still use Explorer as you default browser.

Go to  http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/index.html,   download the latest version of Netscape ( 6.2 as of this writing)  and come back.   And no, download times are not included in the 60 minutes...  When you install Netscape, choose the standard installation, it includes Composer even though it is not listed in the instructions.

Winzip

Winzip is compression program which allows you to pack your files in a compact single file which you can easily send by email. You can download the latest version from http://www.winzip.com  and you're going to need it for the next tool anyway.

Also, if you choose to get your site hosted through the JCNA website, you will need it to send us you file.

Follow the directions to download and install Winzip. It's well written and very intuitive.

Imaging tools

Now that you have the tool to compose your own pages, you're going to need something to edit images that you will put on your web site... you do want to have a few pictures there don't you ?

You don't really have to do this but trust me... you want to !  you do not want to have huge images on your page so you may as well do it right from the beginning. Go to   http://www.irfanview.com/english.htm   and download their irfanView. If this site is slow, got www.freeware.com search for irfanview in their little search box near the top of the page and download it from there.

iView is free, it's pretty small and works real well. If you have a large number of images you want to put on your site, you can even resize them in batch, saving you a lot of times...

And that concludes part one of our 60 minute web site tutorial... still with me so far ? Relax... that was the hardest part, the rest is real easy !

 

On to part 2... the home page

 

 

 

[HOME] [MEMBERS] [CALENDAR] [LIBRARY] [STANDINGS] [CLUBS] [JOIN] [CLASSIFIEDS] [FORUMS] [ABOUT] [CONTACT US] [JAGUAR JOURNAL] [SITE MAP]