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America's Town Square |
So You Want a Home Page?
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America's Town Square |
First it was Captain Midnight decoder rings. (If you know Captain Midnight,
you're about ready for the ranch in Sun City.) In more
modern times there were designer
jeans, quickly followed by vanity license plates. (IWEBHEAD) Now
it's your very own home page. A home page will make your family
proud, your friends will look at you with new admiration, and
your enemies will be jealous.
As with most other tasks, the hardest part of creating a home is getting started. The good guys at America's Town Square to the rescue. We've created a form to input your vital statistics and other good information. You click on Submit and your own home page -- complete with a few nifty graphics -- will appear on the screen like magic. You can save it, modify it, and show the world. We ask only two things in return. Please leave the little ATS promo at the bottom of the page intact so the rest of the world can share in your discovery and also create their own home page. Also, let us know your Home Page's URL so we can give you a link.
This tutorial, complete with an online Web Page Builder, is designed
to have your first Web page available for the world in an hour or
less. On little note of caution. Your first step is find out if
your ISP allows Web publishing, and if so the location details.
Many providers publish the information on their own home page, so that's
a good place to start. If their home page doesn't have the information,
call them on the phone. You'll need the information for part two
of this tutorial.
You might want to take a look at an example home page created by Home Page Builder. It will give you a good idea of what to expect when you go to the input form.
The next document will be a live form. You enter a bunch of information about yourself. Think about what you want to say about yourself, you have 4 paragraphs. If you spell as poorly as most of the ATS propeller heads, you might want to word process the paragraphs and then simply cut and paste into the form. If you have some favorite links, get them handy.
After your page is created, it will be e-mailed to you. Optionally, you will be
given the opportunity to see your Home Page creation display in your browser.
You may also save it to your local hard disk directly from your browser. Drop your browser's
file menu, select Save As, and pick a name and directory. It's
a good idea to call it "index.htm" (without the quotes.)
If you new to this sort of thing, it would be a good idea to create
a dedicated directory. Something like, HOMEPAGE would be nice.
The graphics used on your home page will be attached to an e-mail message which
will also be e-mailed to you. All of the required graphics are in a self-extracting
compressed file named "graphics.exe". Save the file to the same directory containing your
home page and simply execute the program. You may delete graphics.exe after you have extracted
the individual files.
If you cannot use a DOS type executable file, you can get the graphics by picking them off one at a time. If you're using Netscape and you click on the graphic with your right mouse button, a little menu will come up. One of the options is "Save this Image as..." If you click on this option you are presented with the familiar Windows "Save As" dialog box. There are two hidden graphics. The one used for the background is named, "bg.gif" and there is a little one named "tab.gif" that is used to simulate a tab. Make sure you get both of these. You can also download all of them in one shot by clicking on this link.
Let's assume you have downloaded your home page to C:\HOMEPAGE\INDEX.HTM.
You can view the document by entering the following in your browser's
URL box:
file:///c:/homepage/index.htm
Note the three "/"s. There is normally a domain name between the second and third slashes, since you're fetching from your local disk, there is no domain.
An HTML document is a plain text file. You can modify it using
any editor or word processor. If you use a word processor, make
sure you save it as plain text. Before experimenting, it's a good
idea to save the original so you can get back if your editing
session goes poorly. (Isn't that a nice way of saying you mucked
things up?) Copy it to INDEX.ORG.
To section will be completed shortly.
Home Page Builder is
brought to you as a free service by those wonderful folks at
America's Town Square. You are free to use the output product as
you see fit. Feel free to enhance, modify, or completely destroy.
Two Small Condition
for using Home Page Builder.
You agree to leave the America's Town Square logo and text,
as show below, intact on the bottom of your page so others might
share in the fun. We would also appreciate if you let us know what
your Home Page URL will be so we can link to your site.
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This page was created by
Home Page Builder which is brought to you -- free -- by those wonderful folks at America's Town Square. |
I agree to the conditions
take me to the Home Page construction site.
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self-updating guestbook How about some free stuff from ATS? |
Please send our
crotchety Webmaster some mail.
Copyright ©1996 America's Town Square
15 Hunter Drive
Tuckerton, NJ 08087
(609) 294-0320
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