When I first came on the internet I met a lot of individuals with their own home pages and I decided that I wanted one too. Well I had a little trouble understanding just how to go about setting it up and I spent alot of time trying to figuar it out. If it wasn't for the helpful people who took the time to write pages on HTML and home page design, I probably would have never figuared it out. This page is my chance to help others who would like their own home page. Although I have tried to make these instructions as simple as possible, please keep in mind that this page is only meant to get you started, if you want to learn more, there are plenty of resources for HTML help listed with most of the search engines. So be patient and if you have any trouble getting started, please feel free to email me with your questions.:-)
First of all you need to have an idea of what type of homepage you want. I suggest you look around the neighborhoods of Yahoo/ Geocities to see what can be done with a home page. (You may have to click on the links a couple of times to get the families/general page to list the sites as this page is a little difficult to get working.)When you do get it to display a list of sites, look around and if you find a homepage that you really like, write the address down or print the page out, so you can find it again. Note: As Geocities updates their utilities, you may find some of these addresses change. Please let me know if you find a address that doesn't work and I will update it.
If you only want a page where people you meet on the net, can go to learn more about you and your family you have little to worry about. Just find a neighborhood here in Geocities where you want to put your homepage and then apply for it. You will recieve an email message shortly after, confirming your address. The message will have a link on it that will take you to the geocities utilities area. Utilities is where you can change your password, name your homepage, and create your page. All of the information there is pretty simple to use. But since I am acting as your guide, I will take you through the basic of setting up a simple page.
When you go to the utility page the only thing you will do is enter your member name and the password they gave you. This will take you to another page where you will be able to change your password and fill out some information about yourself. This is also the page where you will put a short description of your page contents. (If you looked through the neighborhoods, it is the message you saw next to a house, example: Johnny's page of laughs)
The next page you will go to will probably be where you create your page. On this page, you will be asked to choose an editor, choose the basic editor and you are ready to begin.
When you are in the basic editor you will be able to make a simple page with a few fancy lines and graphics. I have seen some done with this editor that looked pretty good so give it a chance. Play around with it, you will have the option of viewing what you have done and then changing it untill you get it the way you want it to look. It is pretty simple, however it allows you to use html tags in the body and you might be asking what is that? Well it is things like, making a word in bold print, adding a link to a word, or even putting in a little form for visitors to fill out. If you are interested in learning more about HTML, you will find an excellent tutorial at: http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/tut1.html It will give you easy to use instructions, that you can print out. You can either do the lesson or just find things that you want to add and print them out. I recommend you at least skim through all of it! It will be useful in explaining the basic language of HTML to you, no matter what type page you decide to do. For a quick view of tags keep reading. Please feel free to copy any of the information here.
A HTML tag is opened with <something> and usually closed with </something> the / is the closing factor. The red print below is the tag, do not change it. The tag will not show up on the finished page. The blue print is any information you want to appear on your page, this is the part you will change to fit your page.
Bold and Italic Tags- This whole page is in bold print to make it easier to read, but for this example I have removed the bold tags, so you can see the difference. The first sentence is the HTML and the second is the results that appears on the finished page.
To make words bold, open with <B>The word or words you want bold here</B> and close.
To make words in italics print, open with <I>words in italic print</I> and close.
You can put the bold and italic tags together <B><I>to get bold italic print.</I></B>
<P>The dog ran really fast</P> This is a normal line and it will start at the left side of the page.
The dog ran really fast
<P ALIGN=CENTER>The dog ran really fast</P> See how the sentence is centered. Also there is a space between this line and the next.
<P ALIGN=RIGHT>The dog ran really fast</P>This line will start at the right side of your page.
FONT Tags - To change the size or color of your text, you will use a <FONT> tag. The normal size of text is 3 but you can make it bigger or smaller. The range is 1 - 7 in size.
The <FONT SIZE=2>dog</FONT> ran really fast. The 2 will make the word "dog" smaller than normal. To make the whole sentence smaller or bigger just put all of it inside the Font tag.
The dog ran really fast.
The <FONT SIZE=5>dog</FONT> ran really fast. The 5 will make the word dog bigger. Also note that when the text is bigger it appears to be bolder, but bold is another tag.
The <FONT COLOR="#800080">dog</FONT> ran really fast. Notice that the color is inside "guotation marks" and has a # sign before the numbers. Don't forget to add those when you are changing a color. The color of the word dog is changed to purple with this tag. You can find a color chart here, if you would like to have different colored words on your page.
Adding links - To add a link to some other site use the following tag. Remember spelling and punctuation counts! Example - if you use a comma instead of a period the person clicking on the link will get a error message saying not found. When you find a site you want to link, to be sure you copy it's address which is also know as the URL, down correctly. The blue print is the information you will change, to add a link. Remember to close this tag with the </A> !!!
<A HREF="http://www.oocities.org/Heartland/1539/"> A friends page </A> In this case the words, A friends page, will be the link. So this is what will appear on your page.
To put a simple form on your geocities page follow these directions.
Open the form with the tag below. Put your member name where mine says, memomme. <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="/cgi-bin/homestead/mail.pl?memomme">
Next you will probably want a text field. That is where you can ask for stuff like the persons name, email or home page address, or even their favorite football team.
<P><INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="team" VALUE="" SIZE=30>favorite team</P>This will give you:
favorite team
Next you may want a place where visitors can make comments or suggestions about your page, or even list their favorite football players. This is called a text area.
<P><TEXTAREA NAME="players" ROWS=7 COLS=27></TEXTAREA>favorite players</P>To get this.
favorite players
Next you need a submit button so you can get the comments. And maybe a reset so they can clear it and do it again. Note: The way this form is set up, after hitting submit, you will have to hit "Back" on your browser to return to this page. This form will not be sent to me, so don't bother filling it out. :-)
<P><INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="name"VALUE="Submit">
<INPUT TYPE="reset" VALUE="Reset"></P> Gives you this
The next line is where you specify the subject of this form. It will appear on the email you recieve with the information.
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="subject" VALUE="Football">
Now be sure to close the form with this tag!
</FORM>
Once you get these basics down you may want to download a homepage editor, or use the geocities advanced editor, to add even more graphics or other stuff to your page. I suggest you spend a lot of time viewing the document source of different pages to get a full understanding of the different tags and codes of HTML and how they appear on a page. To do this, go to view on your browsers tool bar and choose document source. This will let you see the HTML behind the page.
Good Luck! And if you have any comments, question, or tips you would like to share with me, please feel free to write to me at: