I hope you didn't get dragged into the PC and Internet age kicking and screaming (that's too painful for anyone), but regardless of how you got here, I'm glad you're here now. You've already figured out how to browse Internet web pages - you wouldn't be reading this article if you didn't! But what if you have something to say yourself and would like to publish it on the web? It's a lot easier than you think - there is no need to panic when you hear that four-letter word HTML. HTML simply stands for HyperText Markup Language. Try to think of it in the same way that you'd think of doing mark-up language for print editing - even many HTML tags use the same codes as print mark-up language, so here's a short guide to rolling your very own web page. Despite what you might think, it isn't expensive or even very confusing, and it probably won't cost you any money at all.

Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide you with space for your own web page as part of your monthly Internet fees. If your ISP doesn't and you don't want to switch, don't despair. There are many web services that provide you with free space to put up a web page, including the following (by no means comprehensive) list:

Geocities

Tripod

Angelfire

Xoom

To find other free web space providers, just go to your favorite search engine and use "free web space providers" as your search term - you're bound to turn up dozens of them.

Building a web page is easier than you think, too, all you need to start out with is a text editor. You can even use Notepad. I prefer TextPad (a freeware text editor for Windows) because it has a built- in spell-checker, and if you're a MacIntosh user, the freeware program BBEdit Lite will do you nicely. Any text editor will serve the purpose, as long as it saves files in plain text.

A useful tip: You never know what kind of server your web page will be stored on, or what kind of browser will be used to view it, so keep your files in lowercase letters and adhere to the 8.3 DOS naming convention. Example: "mypage.htm" (without the quotation marks) can be viewed on any machine, while "This Is My Page.HTML" wouldn't be viewable to UNIX or Windows 3.1 users. A lot of web servers are run on UNIX platforms, so make sure that all your filenames are in lowercase letters - or a UNIX server will choke when it's trying to serve up your web page to the public. Most ISPs will want you to use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client to upload your pages, but all ISPs are different, so check with yours, or with the free web space provider you choose, to make sure you get the right instructions for how to upload your page, because it will differ slightly from one ISP or web space provider to another.

HTML documents, or web pages, are basically a collection of simple text files, marked up with HTML so that web browsers know how to read them. You can do some pretty fancy things with HTML (even using a simple text editor), but for the purposes of this article, we're going to concentrate on text and how to put links to other web pages in your web page. You'll undoubtedly want to learn more about it, HTML has a way of becoming addictive, and that's great, but you need to know some of the basics first.

Web browsers are not smart. You need to tell them that a page is an HTML file, as well as give them instructions about how the page is laid out. (Printers' assistants are considerably smarter than web browsers, but the idea is the same - you mark up your text for publication, whether it's for print or for the web.) A web browser doesn't even know how to break up paragraphs, so if you don't tell it to by using HTML tags, your page will be one big run-on paragraph.

And remember that anything you put on the web is going to be out there publicly for 50 million or more people to see. Don't say anything that's going to come back to haunt you.

Okay, let's get to the good stuff. You've decided to make a web page, maybe about photography, because that's your hobby. So how do you do it?

Start out by typing your text in a text editor the way you'd type any document. It is possible to use word processors, like MS Word or Word Perfect, but they usually do a pretty bad job of translating things into HTML, so in this case - simplest is bestest.

Now that you've got your text written, let's go to the next step - mark-up.

Here are some simple tags you need to know, so print this out and keep it by the computer while you're working.

is for bold text

is for italicized text

is for underlined text

creates a paragraph

adds a line break without creating a paragraph, like in a poem

To create a link to another page on the web, type:

then type the name of the link here

To make a bulleted list, do it this way:

• first item

• second item

• third item

  and so forth until you get to the end, then:

To put the title you want everyone to see in your page, type

This is My Page

To make a smaller header type

This is the next section of my page

There are some other things you need to do to tell browsers how to read your page, so let's pretend we're making a page right now. You can cut and paste the next part into a text editor, like Notepad or BBEdit, and save it as "sample.htm" (without the quotes). When you open it in your browser it really will be a real web page, I promise. It won't be fancy, you can learn how to do that later, but this is enough to get you started with putting text on the web and linking to other web pages. In case you're curious about what that

Okay, I lied. This isn't my photography page, but I'm just learning how to use HTML, so it will be soon. And there is one link to a cool web site about photography on the web here, so it's sort of related to photography, after all!

I used to be scared of the HTML word, but the more I use HTML, the more I'm finding that it's easy and fun.

Some things you need to do:

• Find an ISP or web space provider

• Learn a little HTML

• Check your page in your own browser to make sure that it

  works

• Have fun!

Here's a for real link to a great photography web site:

I hope you enjoy the link, and please check back - there will be lots more on my page soon!

------------------------------------

The tags need to be at the beginning and end of your text, so that browsers will know it's a web page. And you need the < HEAD> and tags so that browsers can present your page properly.

If you look at it carefully, you'll notice that pretty much all the tags need to be closed except the

, or paragraph, and
, or break tags. Some people close paragraph tags, too, with

at the beginning of a paragraph, and

Make sure to close the other tags. If you don't close the tag, which is called an anchor tag, everything from that first"" is going to be one big link on your page. The same goes for bold, italic, center and list tags, or whole rest of page will be in the same format as the first tag you leave open - if it's a tag, then the whole document will be in bold print, if it's a

tag then everything will be in a bulleted list. Close the tags as shown earlier, for example, if it's a bold, or tag, use to close it.

One of the coolest things about doing HTML pages is that you can preview them in your own web browser or web browsers to see how they're going to look before you let them be seen by the world at large - you can even connect to the Internet, put your own page in a browser(without even publishing it first), and make sure that your links work. Sometimes things don't always show up the same way in different web browsers, so the only tags I've used are the ones that are standard, and can be read by pretty much any browser out there now.

Again, you can get fancier, and you'll probably want to. You can even find web-authoring tools like Microsoft's FrontPage and Macromedia's Dreamweaver that will hide all the HTML and let you make a page without seeing any of it. I don't advise using them, at least not when you're first learning HTML, because sometimes something on our web page is going to need to be fixed, and to do a quick fix, you need to know what's causing the problem - if you've never seen HTML before, it'll be hopeless.

Spend an hour making a web page about something fun tonight. You don't have to publish it, remember, you can see it on your own computer. I bet you'll want to do some web research or go out and buy a book or two about how to design web sites.

After all, you thought you'd never make a web page at all, and you just did. Congratulations!