First, you need to understand that a website is a series of linked pages or documents. Generally speaking, unless you're doing something really fancy, these pages will be HTML documents. (This is why the address of a basic web page ends with the extension .htm or .html, just as a Word document always ends in the extension .doc.) To get an idea of what an HTML document looks like, go to the "View" tab of your browser (if you're using Explorer) and then select "Source." If you're using Netscape, go to "View" and then "Page Source." This will allow you to see what this page looks like in raw HTML format. Don't be daunted. It's not quite as complicated as it looks. If you scroll down a fair way you'll end up finding the text of this article. But you'll notice this text is surrounded and interspersed with a whole lot of commands and information held inside triangular brackets. These commands are HTML "tags" which instruct your browser how to display my text as I want it to appear. The "p" tag, for example, tells your browser to start a new paragraph. The "br" tag tells your browser to insert a line-break. The "title" tag tells your browser to display the title of the article in a larger point-size.

And so on. If you want to set up a half-way decent looking website, you'll need to familiarize yourself with all the basic HTML tags, and learn how to use HTML to create links between pages, to insert and position images, to change fonts, and so on. I'm afraid I don't have the space or the patience to teach you all that. I suggest you buy a basic book on the subject. I don't want to endorse any particular product, but in my experience you can't go wrong with one of those books aimed specifically at the absolute duffer -- "HTML For Absolute Cretins," that sort of thing.

I further suggest, if you're really committed to this website thing, that you invest in some web-design software. A good software program can take an awful lot of the difficulty out of building your own site. It can write a lot of the tags for you, and it can be a great help when the time finally comes for you to upload your documents onto your host's server. The "Absolute Cretins" book that I bought came with a CD containing a lot of sample software programs. I trialed one of them -- called Dreamweaver -- for a month and found it so user-friendly that I wound up buying a licence for it. At $400 U.S. it didn't come cheap, but if you're serious about your site something of the kind might well prove to be a worthwhile investment.

Kirk Kinbote was the driving editorial and design force behind http://www.adancingbear.com/

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