How to Get a Site (for free)

A home page of your own!

Kinda reminds me of that song about the "Bow Weevle." "Gotta find me a home!" Well we've got it a lot better than the critter in that song ever had it. Finding a place to put up your own personal home page is a very easy thing to do. Go to any Search engine and do a query on "Free Home Page" or try freewebspace.net which seems dedicated to finding everyone a home.

Still beware, free isn't always free - in fact it almost never is! Here's what i consider to be the biggies: TriPod, Angelfire, and GeoCities! Especially GeoCities! Whew! Finally i get to thank them for all they've done for me. Thank you GeoCities, very much! GeoCities is a very good place to consider setting you very own personal home page! They have been great for me - and to me!

Ok, so you want a home page and i've shown you how to get one, so what goes on it, and how? This is all free so don't get nervious on me. MOST things on the net are FREE! A home page does take some work, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

Now that you are all inspired and all let's discuss what you can put on your home page and have a sucessful site - who wants a website that no one knows about? Guess what, there's a free service to put your website on all the popular search engines! How 'bout dat?

PLAN OF ACTION:
	Find the best place for your site
	Sign up for free
	Begin planning site
		A site that is:
			Your resume
			Your place to meet singles
			A place to meet a pen-pal
			A place to display your collection
				of baseball cards
				comics
				your best scores on Doom
				whatever...
			Offer to buy an airplane
			Post or seek information on something
			State your views
				on death penalty
				tobacco
				politics
				beliefs
				ect.
			Any or all of the above...
	Putting together the text/HTML for site
		As long as you know what it is YOU want it can
		  be done - and most likely for free!
	Getting pic or sound files or whatever for your site
		People will contribute a lot of this 
	Put the site up
		Learn a bit about FTP and passwords
			The FTP program is free
	Test the site
		The editors are free
		The browsers are free
		The knowledge is free
	Advertise the site
		Search engines
		News groups
		Word-of-mouth
		E-mail
		NewsLetter
	Improve the site
		Counter
		Guest Book
		Forum
		Newsletter
		Bulletins
		Navigation
		Extras

Quite a list, huh? Not to worry, how important to you is it to be able to have YOUR say out here on the net with maybe a thousand people a day seeing what it is you want to say!

Ok, so you have an idea for a site that you think would be interesting - if nothing else it can be a place where you can just get your feelings out - that's an important thing, i know...

Let's get started

Go get your site - i'll wait right here! First though, bookmark this page and i'll help you through this... Either go to a search engine and type in "free home pages" Or go to freewebspace.net or just go to GeoCities, it won't take but a minute!

Ok! You got your page! Lot's easier than getting a loan, huh? Now let's lay this thing out so it will be spiffy! The first page you work on is the index.html page. Why? When people type in your address they have no idea what any of the pages on your site are named so they just type in the address and leave off the name of the page. When the host computer sees that it looks to see if there is an index page there. If there is then it sends that page. Once your visitor gets that it should be able to send them on to the rest of your site.

The index page has the job of being the "Eye-grabber." It's what makes people stay or leave. You should briefly describe your site and the features you think will attrack the most people. Now, that being said, index pages come in two flavors. One greets your visitor and has links to every major part of your site. The other kind is more of a cover sheet: it describes the site briefly and has one link inside the site that goes to a page like the first kind of index page. Let's refer to the first kind of index page as a cover sheet and the second kind as a "heart."

The heart of your site; what should be there? 
	Links to every corner of your site
	Your email address and name
	Link to your guest book
	Site GOAL
		Who
		What
		Where
		When
		How
	Bulletins
	Chronological list of things
	   added to your site

Check out how my pg-side.html page is set up to see how that's done. It's not the net standard, but a good way, i think, to do things...

THE COUNTER: A counter is one thing you put on yourself for yourself. It lets you know how many hits you are doing and give you a feeling of the ebb and flow of your site. That's part of the reward of having a good site.

Let's say you used your index page as a cover sheet and put in a heart page with all your internal links there; your counter is going to give you the number off NEW people hitting your site - that's maybe the best thing to keep count of!

If you combined your index page with your heart page then your count is going to be a lot higher and will reflect the activety of the site. Say you didn't want to keep track of that. You could have your index page be the heart page which links to points inside your site and then have those pages link back to a page that looks like your index page - minus the counter! That way you get a number that reflects new visitors and if this new page had a counter on it then you could get a reading on site activety to compare with the first counter.

Maybe you don't need all that info. If you do then that's how to do it.

A very good idea! This lets people write you without the need to write back. They get to have their say about the site and you can write if you want or if they ask you a question. Usually, if your site is good, its a place where they can heap some kudos on your site - rewarding, huh?

No matter how much effort you put into your site or how good it is, if they can't find their way around on it then they won't stay! ALWAYS plan ahead how you want your visitors to navigate your site. The simplest approach is to put up all your internal links on your heart page and on all pages put a link back to the heart page again. A better way to do it is to put all the internal links on all the pages to make life even easier for your visitors. The problem is to put all these links in a format that appears compact. An image map is a good choice or a compact table of links, like i use, is good. Take the time to make a good navigation bar then copy&paste it to all the new pages you make.

Can you do something to speed up your visitor's modem or internet connection? Not really. All internet connections run at one speed only, too slow! Here's what you can do: keep all file sizes as small as possible! This is a biggie! Keep the pages short and the pics small. You cannot do everything possible to make your pages fast using a WYSIWYG HTML editor - i think. Read my next page on HTML to find out why...