Website

I get asked many things during the course of my day online... most things I can answer with a simple return IM, but some are a little more complicated and require an emailed response which is ok too... but then there's the ones that just plain blow my mind.. like an IM asking "How do I build a web site??" The first thing I do is reach for my coffee bucket… is it full?... the last is check my watch... do I have a spare life time? Usually the first gets a negative response so it's gone downhill from there...

Giving advice and direction on building a web site is a little more complicated than it first appears... in the time it has taken me to try to format a direction for this category I could have built a city full of sites! It is most definitely easier to build one than it is to explain HOW to build one! Where do you start? do you cover WYSIWYG editors? do you cover templates? do you cover page builders? do you throw it all out the window, pull out notepad and start the with basics like
inserts a line break? Arrgghh! Then it hit me! I'd run out of coffee! No wonder I was brain dead ;-) While I was waiting for the kettle to boil I started thinking back to my very first home page...

Yes, I remember it.. albeit a little foggy... It was a stock stand homepage hosted by Geocities back before they got eaten by Yahoo! or was it the other way round.. doesn't matter... my computer had a 4meg hard drive (yes megabytes not gigabytes!) and I was a true newbie but I managed to construct a web site... you know the kind I mean.. the "This is me.. This is my family.. This is where we live.. This is our Dog.." actually I don't think I had a dog back then.. but you get my point.. it was a "personal homepage" nothing fancy, nothing technical.. it was simple, just photos and text.. the most complex thing about it was a guestbook.. yes they were around way back then too ;-) but I couldn't get mine to work so I took it off.. I couldn't get the text to align around a photograph either.. I'd put in the text and drop the photo into the middle expecting the text to wrap around.. but all it did was have a reaction similar to that of two magnets butting heads... overall the experience caused a few tantrums and more than a few trips the recycle bin trying to salvage something once I'd calmed down.. No matter what way I look at it, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that nailing jelly to a tree would have been easier then building the site! So what would have made it easier?

As I popped the lid on the coffee jar the aroma and a brain wave hit me! One clearly triggered the other ;-) What would have made the experience easier all round was having someone around to answer my questions.. like how do I wrap text around a picture? how do I get my page to play horrid midi music? I want a deadly cool background where do I go? I've out grown the pagebuilder.. I want some software so I can make my own from scratch.. what do I use? Is Geocities the best place for my site? Gravity has befallen my pictures.. why are all they all sitting down the bottom of my page? Point being I wish I had me as I am now on tap for me as I was back then.. if you can follow that then building a web page is going to be easy ;-)

So what is the format for this category..
well it's not going to cover the step by steps on how to insert a picture… what it will cover is how to align your image and how to wrap text, the html codes and what they mean.. it won't give you a midi to insert but it will tell you where to get them and how to get them to stop irritating your visitors to the point where they are either forced to turn off their speakers or leave your site completely.. it will show you the html code that your background image and/or colour sits in but it won't tell you how to use pagebuilder to do it.. it will have a directory on where to go for what and have a few of the basic html codes so that you can start to recognise what it is your pagebuilder has told the browsers to do.. it will also cover your questions so you have them then email me.. if your struggling with why your page won't do what you want it to do then let me know.. [post the url at our forum] explaining what the problem is I'll / we'll go along and check it out :-)

In conclusion...
if your ready to stand proudly upon a little square of the net and shout "This is me and my dog! Come sign my guestbook so I know someone has actually seen my site!" and you're prepared to do some research on your own then feel free to join in and pop along to our [Forum] for additional support and resources :-)

Thought for the Day...
nothing like an empty coffee bucket to trigger brain activity ;)

{no-combomax}