Welcome to My Website!

This page is an example of what could be your personal webpage - I will will go through the initial process of setting up your website, using Geocities as your 'free host' - they are currently offering 11 mb of space for personal web pages, which is plenty of room. Geocities sites come at the cost of either 'banner advertising' at the top of each of your pages, or java driven 'pop-up' ads that appear each time one of your pages is accessed.

If you wish to go through the entire process yourself and have some knowledge of html coding; you can go directly to the Geocities 'Join' area and sign up for yourself (be prepared to spend some time finding a username that isn't already taken - or think up something creative before hand (or just use your own name - why didn't I think of that)!

If you have already signed up at Geocities and need a hand with your genealogy site (page setup wise not content wise) let me know!

If on the other hand, you are unfamiliar with html coding and creating a web site in general, then I should be able to help you out - first, I will need some basic information from you to apply for the space at Geocities:
I will require:

• your email address
• your complete postal address (it would make a good password for the site)
• if there is a graphics background or set that you would like to start out with; send along the name and URL (address)
• while I am getting things set up; you can get ready the text that you would like to appear on the first page (a Hi there! I'm...sort of thing), a list of surnames etc, whatever you expect to put on that first page. You will have to email it to me in a plain text format as I do not have any of the fancy word processing programmes)
• you can expect to receive a lot of messages from me at first as I try to figure out exactly what it is that you would like done on the page
• WORK ON THIS By the way, if you want to use any photos (they have to be in the jpg format - and would probably have been 'scanned' into that format) then I would suggest that none appear on your 'entry' page. If there were to be many of them, they should be presented on a separate page entirely as photos take a while to download and you do not want to delay your basic pages.

• AOL CLIENTS - you are going to have a bit of difficulty compared to non-aol customers. Start off by going to this page which explains the situation about the aol browser and graphics compression - it contains a walk through on how to change the compression option - which should not be 'on' for any reason!
  Roxy's Renditions: Web Page Help...I have never seen it explained any better and Roxy's is a great graphics site also (a source for backgrounds and web page graphics sets!)
• do you know how to 'download' or 'capture' graphics and backgrounds on-line?
• do you know anything at all about html (hypertext markup language) coding? This is the language that is used to write web page documents; it is a series of 'tags' or 'instructions' that tell your browser how to display the contents (text and graphics) of the web page that is being loaded on your screen (and how, for example, I wrote html in bold text in the line above). A basic knowledge, at least, is necessary for you to be able to maintain a web site - even if you eventually use one of the fancy 'editors' that can write up pages for you. If you have no knowledge or very little knowledge of html - then I would recommend that you enroll for the short course that is conducted through Geocities 'WebTech University'. It is short, basic and (fairly) painless - it is conducted by email and you just follow the instructions - there are 4 or 5 lessons over a 2 week period, that you complete at your own pace; you can ask questions of your instructor by email, and I have found them to be very helpful. It will also save me from having to try to explain exactly what it is that we are doing with your web pages - and that's a good thing! :-)
  
  It's at WebTech University go to 'curriculum' and click on 'html 101' to sign up!
  
  Another great html course (it's where I first learned html) is available at . It is a 'do it yourself' type course. You can download the entire 'course' (consisting of lessons, graphics etc) which is broken up into lessons, then proceed at your own rate - as opposed to trying to follow the lessons while 'on line'. It takes you through writing a web page; you write a page about volcanoes, learning a great deal about html coding and volcanoes at the same time! (sometimes you have to keep trying to reach it, the server seems a mite slow) (The tutorial includes nearly 500 HTML and image files that occupy about 2.2 MB of disk space)
  
  these are also good html tutorial sites:
  Annabells's HTML help..nice and basic
  Instant HTML...a humourous guide to html
  A Beginner's Guide to HTML
  Introduction to HTML..by Case Western Reserve Univeristy
• Roxy's Renditions Basic tags  Advanced tags

• sample at the Mousepad