Lords of their universe

Want your own web page? SHELLEY HOWELLS learns the secrets from four teenagers who started from the bottom.

I stand at the door blinking as my eyes adjust to the gloom.

Behind is a dazzling, sunny day, birds twittering, cicadas scraping.

Ahead, a dim basement lit by the eerie blue of a computer screen, a small lamp and the dull yellow glow from the spines of generations of National Geographic magazines. PlayStation 2 roars until a man we'll call dad yells, and the sound is muted.

This is teen heaven - a private space where nobody minds if you stick your feet on the couch or make a racket.

There's a row of cool, battered lockers covered with stickers, a pile of bikes, a fridge full of Sprite and a plate of sandwiches on the table.

Anyone's heaven, come to think of it.

We're braving the basement to learn about building web pages, figuring that your average 14-year-old knows more on the subject than any number of books with the word "dummies" in the title.

Peter Ellis, Roshan Mehta, Jared Miller and Vishal Prasad all have their own websites reflecting their obsession with anime (see related story).

"I started my first site as kind of a joke," says Peter, "but I found I really liked it."

Since then, he has built more and more complex sites.



To get started, he headed to SiteBuilder at web-page hosting site Homestead (www.homestead.com), where there are ready-made page templates in lots of different design styles and purposes (including photo albums, CVs etc) into which you can drop your own text and images.

(As usual, Mac users should check to see that the chosen host is Mac-friendly before starting.)

But Peter soon found that using others' designs was too limiting. The sites he aspired to, such as Digimon Experience (www.digiexperience.com) were way more fancy.

To get sophisticated he needed to learn a whole new lingo, HTML (hypertext markup language), which surrounds a block of text with codes that indicate how it should appear.

There are many ways to learn, like courses, websites (Web Monkey - www.webmonkey.com - has a beginners' Teaching Tool which they claim will have you HTML-savvy in a few hours) and books, but Peter found the best way was to study the HTML scripts on others' sites.

(To do this, go to a web-page then on the toolbar head to view and then select source. The HTML script will appear in a new window.)

He did try some of the HTML-teaching websites but couldn't understand them!

"I just kept looking at others' scripts, experimented and then, one day, it all just fell into place," he says.

All the guys stress the same points: to build a decent site you must learn HTML. To learn HTML you've got to get in there and try it.

Peter stayed with Homestead, changing to an HTML site until they started charging ($US5 a month) for hosting - at which point he moved to Yahoo!'s free Geocities (www.geocities.com). Other places to go include Angelfire (www.angelfire.com) and Tripod (www.tripod.com).

Your ISP probably offers site-hosting facilities too. For example, ihug's Gold account offers 5mb worth of free hosting.

Peter's latest site, Anime Fusion (www.anime-fusion.cjb.net - best viewed using Netscape), is just a couple of months old and he says it's his best yet.

His mate Jared also learned HTML by studying others' scripts and experimenting. He started page building out of boredom when his friends became consumed by it.

As well as a decent and free hosting site and HTML skills, Jared says that for professional-looking graphics and effects you need a graphics programme like Photoshop or Photo Impact (which they say is easier to use than Photoshop).

In his case, he got graphics-mad friend Roshan to do the graphics while he designed the rest of his site (www.anime-unlimited.cjb.net), which he is still building using the HTML-only web hosting site Brinkster (www.brinkster.com).

Peter and Jared avoid long and ungainly web-addresses by using the free redirection service at CJB (www.cjb.net).

Roshan used online tutorials (www.htmlgoodies.com) to help learn HTML when his passion for DragonballZ, especially the graphics, got the better of him and he decided to spread the word from his own site.

Sadly, his host site was maliciously destroyed by a hacker, so he has had to start all over again.

The same happened to Peter, as well as another friend who has quit building websites because of it.

They say such hackers are either trying to be clever or launching revenge attacks if they feel some of their own material has been stolen.

It takes quite a bit of time to build and maintain their sites. They spend an average of an hour a day on maintenance. Vishal got sick of the maintenance and quit his site, but recently started to build a new one (www.szw.szassault.net coming soon) with a guy he met chatting on MSN Messenger (www.msn.com).

They all have a wide circle of MSN friends who help them, teach them and even offer free graphics.

They all hope to make careers in the e-universe (because it's fun and it's where everything is going, says Peter), starting with computer science studies at uni once they have finished at Mt Roskill Grammar.

But there is more to their lives than darkened basements (helped, no doubt, by parental time limits on the computer). Sports and old-fashioned homework get as much attention.

In fact, no doubt exhausted by having to dumb-down their techno-speak, they're keen to see the back of us so they can head out on their bikes.

But they leave us better informed:

How to Build a Site step one: have a passion for something, anything that you want to share with the world.

Step two: build a basic site (ie, shrine to your obsession, be it your pet iguana or Shoes of the Rich and Famous) using ready-made templates.

Step three: become frustrated with the limitations of step two.

Step four: learn HTML.

Step five: attempt your first grown-up site.

Step six: look around and notice that all your old friends have been replaced by people with their own domain-names.