By MICHAEL FOREMAN
So you want to build your own website. It can be easy, but the first thing to decide is exactly how easy you want it to be.
To use a photographic analogy, do you want to take holiday snaps with an instant camera or are you interested in developing your own film?
Taking the easiest options first, if you want to set up a site for free and without any programming at all, head to Homestead's website.
Homestead promises that you can have your personal/club/business site running in minutes by following simple onscreen instructions.
Minutes may be optimistic in some cases but a few locals have used this service very successfully.
The catch is that in return for up to 16Mb of free web space your site must carry some advertising. At the moment it does not seem too obtrusive but that may change.
Services aimed at specific types of users are also cropping up. For example, at Baby Pages, New Zealand residents can create a homepage for a new addition to the family, simply by filling out an online form.
Parents can then update the site with photos via e-mail and start handing out their baby's web address to friends and family.
If you want more control over your pages without getting too involved in the nitty-gritty, you will be looking at the programs the professionals use, such as Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.
But for anyone with more than a passing interest in building websites, it is worth learning at least the basics of the web language, HTML (hypertext markup language).
Here is your first lesson: Open any text-editing program, for example Notepad, as found on every Windows computer, and type:
Hello World!
Now save the file as hello.htm, open it with any browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator, and you should be looking at your first web page.
You can accomplish a great deal with HTML, and a good tutorial can be found at HTML Primer. But a program that takes a lot of the tedium out of hand-coding HTML, and which many home web builders swear by, is Allaires HomeSite.
The other must-have program is an image editor. Professionals insist on Adobe Photoshop, but cheaper alternatives for the home user include Paint Shop Pro. You will also find useful programming utilities on shareware sites like Tucows or Cnet.
