CREATING A WEB SITE USING FREE TOOLS

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Within the project of having millons of web sites in a one year time, here is how to create a web site easily with free tools.

To have a page on the web, the first you have to do is create a file which extention will be html or htm, for example index.html (depending on the file manager you will upload your files, the most common names for the first visible page are default or index with .htm or .html extention, so either default.htm or index.html would be valid names).

This file can be generated by practicaly any tool available at office or home. You can buy software such as Word or FrontPage, but you can use free tools such as StarOffice or Netscape Composer (this tools commonly have the option of saving the file as .htm or .html, so creating a web page is as simple as writing any document, but saving it as .html).

The next point is to have space in a webserver to upload your files. A webserver is a computer which contains the saved pages where other people can see them through the internet. There is a great number of companies that offer free web page storage, for example http://www.geocities.com/ or http://www.50megs.com/, http://www.maxpages.com/, and http://www.altavista.com/.

For example, we will show you how to create your site in geocities.com, for which you need to have a Yahoo! Mail account. If you do not have an account, you’ll need to create one logging in to http://www.yahoo.com/. If you already have an account, you login to geocities.com (or yahoo.geocities.com) with your Yahoo! user name and password. Geocities will automatically generate your pages’s url (www.geocities.com/user_name).

Next, you upload the page to the server (in geocites.com), you have to login to geocities.com and click on the button labeled "Upload & FTP", next, you’ll find some text fields (at the bottom of the page) where you enter the local address of the file you’re planning to upload (you can either type the address or browse your local drives for your file named "index.htm" by using the "Browse..." button next to the text field. Above this text fields, you will find the option to automatically change the .htm extentions to .html, check on it and enable this option). After you’ve selected the file to upload, press the button labeled "Upload Files". After the browser reloads, the page is already uploaded to the web, to check it out you just have to type your URL on any browser, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape or AOL and see that it is loaded.

The final point is to add your page to every available search engine you can. To add your page to search engines you can use, for example, 50megs.com, that is another site where you can easily create web pages. It has an option labeled "Submit your URL" that takes you to a section where the web pages are submited to several search engines with a simple click. This option is free.

Fernando Galindo Soria

Tel. (+52) (55) 53-91-64-92,     (+52) (55) 57-29-6000 x 52027
fgalindo@ipn.mx , www.fgalindosoria.com
Superior Computing School (ESCOM)
National Polythecnic Institute (IPN)

Mexico City.

Translation to English by Ruben Garcia eztigma@hotmail.com www.eztigma.tk