Making a basic webpage is easy. You can do it yourself. Only minor skills you already might have are needed. If you are very new to computing, it may take you longer to catch on. If you have an America Online account, help is readily available, and more help is available all over the web for everyone. The web has many tutorials on HTML, and other page components. AOL has a ton of help and instructions, and Personal Publisher (now 1-2-3 Publish), which guides you every step of the way. Personal Publisher is available to all AOL members, as is AOL Press, FREE. Many other ISP's provide their members with web space too. Worldnet.att.net does, as does Prodigy. There are free Personal webpages available all over the web too.
Can you copy and paste? Can you use two programs at the same time? Can you minimize and maximize windows? Are you familiar with using the commands from the pop up menu when you right mouse click on text, or an object? Can you highlight text, then copy and paste it into another file? If you can do all of these, you'll have little trouble. If you don't have an AOL account, you'll have to create pages with another program made for making webpages, or a text program, such as Notepad, or WordPad. This is the more advanced way of making pages, as far as from scratch without a program, like Microsoft's Front Page, or others. They can be quite expensive. Using programs you already have to make pages, is free, and only takes up your time. Learning HTML is a good idea. Pace yourself.
All you really need to become familiar with is HTML. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It consists of "tags" that tell your browser how to display the page. HTML is the standard language. HTML commands are put inside brackets. They begin with this one < . They end with this one>. Whatever you type between them will be invisible on a webpage. When you visit a webpage, the HTML tags are not visible on the page. You can look at the HTML file for any page though, very easily. If you are using Internet Explorer, you would simply put your mouse pointer in a blank area of the webpage, where there's no text, or pictures, and right mouse click. A menu will pop up, and you'll see on the list "view source". Select it. Notepad will then usually display the HTML file for the page. Each file (page) begins with the tag "HTML" inside the above brackets (no quotation marks). Each file ends with "/HTML" inside the same brackets again. Get used to them. Every HTML command must be inside these brackets. If they are not, or a bracket is missing, the page will display incorrectly, and the tag will be visible on the page. Some tags are long, and look funny when they are visible on a page sometimes. Typing the tags over and over can be a tedious job. This is where the copy and paste commands come in. That's what expensive programs do for you, add the HTML tags. You can just copy and paste the tags where you need them.
Tags can add many effects to pages, such as headings and tables. They tell your browser what type of font to use to display the webpage, what color background, or wallpaper to use, what color to display the text as, what color hyperlinks should be, what color visited hyperlinks should be, even what size font to display. Using tags, you can put photos and links where you want on the pages. You can align them right, or left, or center. Putting images in a table, sometimes makes them easier to align where you want them. Tables are also how "image maps" are created. That's where you click on an area of an image, and it takes you to a specific page. Many HTML commands require quote marks in different parts. Like links for instance. Also, you must have spaces exactly where they belong, and the right number of spaces. Copy all commands exactly. More to come here soon. This can get you started for now.
~Chuck

Here's a link to another of my pages that has Webmaster Resources.

Chuck's Webmaster Resources Page

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