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How to get started

1	Decide what the site is about. This may sound obvious but it's surprising how far you can go before realising you haven't decided yet. When you set up a website you have lots of choices - name for one. Most free web hosting companies give your website a URL (Uniform Resource Locator - your web address) that contains your user name. By making your mind up in advance you'll be able to choose a user name relevant to your site and so get a suitable URL.
2	Many places offering free websites also offer free email accounts. Think about it. It can be pretty handy to have a separate email account for website matters. An alternative is to register with a remailer. Try to get a username that ties in with your website.
3	There are loads of places where you can get free webspace. See Free Webspace for a list. They all have their pros & cons. Some offer unlimited webspace but have a maximum file size of 500k so don't expect to post any video clips! Geocities have great help but you can't have subdirectories. Every time somebody looks at your Geocities site they get a sponsor window pop open in their browser.
4	Most free hosts provide a way of setting up pages online via your web browser. These are pretty long-winded to use and are usually quite limited in the options available. They're fine for putting up a "Hi, I'll be moving in soon" message. They are also OK if you just need to put text on your page. Just don't expect to win any awards.
5	You can write web-pages using a simple text wordprocessor (like WordPad) although you'll need to know about the HTML codes. To get an idea of what HTML code looks like just click on the appropriate menu choice in your web browser (View/Source in Internet Explorer). Do it now (just remember to close or minimise the viewer to continue surfing). It's actually a lot easier than it looks. See our Web Advice page for sources of HTML primers.
6	Better advice is to get a WYSIWYG editing program like Microsoft FrontPage if you can. A cut down version, FrontPage Express, is included with Internet Explorer 4. Netscape Navigator includes Composer, a similar editing package.
7	When you come to upload your files you'll probably need to "FTP" them. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. All it means is that instead of using your browser (which uses HTTP) you use a separate program specifically designed for uploading files using FTP. Your host will almost certainly have a help page telling you what to do. Failing that go look at the WS_FTP advice.
8	Check what your home page has to be called. Each host has a default name. It's so you can give out a URL without a filename attached. The CheapSkate URL come.to/CheapSkate is easier to remember and type than the full come.to/CheapSkate/default.htm. As you can see the name of our home page is default.htm. Generally the default name is either index.htm or default.htm. Other variants have a capital letter at the beginning and / or .html on the end. It's actually technically possible for the default filename to be anything the system administrator likes so do check. NB Don't swap the case of letters - index.htm is NOT the same as Index.htm.
9	Once you know your home page name make sure all other pages link back to it. Search engines can lead visitors to any page. As a surfer there's nothing worse that finding a good site and being unable to look at anything other than the page you've landed on!
10	You can't always delete your default page. Not all hosts allow you to upload a new version either so how do you change it? Well there are two ways. Either use the online page editor to edit the page or upload a new page using a different name (such as default2.htm) then rename it to be the default page.
	Click here for CheapSkate's web page design tips. Click here for more help on uploading your website.

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