Howdy everyone! My name is Maureen, and I'm here with WebTV Networks Customer Care. This month I am going to give you some information on creating your very own web page. A personal web page is a wonderful way to become part of the Internet's World Wide Web. You have the chance to feature just about anything you want to, from your favorite films, to your poetry, memoirs, or pictures of your beloved dog. It can be just for fun, a work of art, or a scathing social commentary. You can write it once and let it remain as a single stroke of genius, or update constantly, making it uniquely your own.

Free World Wide Web space may be obtained from quite a few places. Check out The Free Homepage Provider Review, which lists reviews for over 40 providers. Angelfire and Tripod are among the most popular sites on the Web that give you web space for free. My personal favorite is Geocities. They offer two megabytes of space for free, easily enough for more than a dozen web pages, and you can choose from one of many virtual neighborhoods to set up your web page. Each neighborhood has distinct features: SoHo is for writing, SiliconValley is for computer-related material, and The Enchanted Forest caters to children's web pages.

To create a home page, you need to use HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML is the language that World Wide Web browsers, like Netscape, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the WebTV Internet terminal use. It tells them where to put your text and pictures on the page. There are many tutorials on how to write HTML available for free on the web. Some that I found to be helpful are: Writing HTML, and SoftQuad WWW Resources (which provides many links to other tutorials) .

HTML basics are not difficult to master. Essentially, you are enclosing text inside tags, using the tags like a bookend. means put every word in BOLD type until I set the closing tag right here. The closing tag says, "Hey, the bold type stops here!" so every word after that will be back to normal. Check out July's Speakeasy for some basic instructions.

To add a link to your home page use this tag:

What you type right here will show up on your page so people can click on it That end tag is called an anchor. Sometimes I forget the anchor tag and end up with my whole page as a link!

To put pictures on your page, you must link to a graphic on another site. Please only do this to sites that allow this practice. Some sites will insist you do NOT link to them, because it interferes with people accessing their page. Also, be aware that linking to sites means that if the webmaster or webmistress chooses to delete the picture you are using from their directory, it will disappear from your page, too. You can check out the WebTV PrimeTime for Developers site for the "I Watch WebTV" graphic -- it's there for you to link to it!

As for content of a web page, you can write about anything that's important to you! Be careful about putting large pictures on your page, because they take a longer time to load and sometimes people visiting your page do not want to wait! They would rather leave your page altogether if it takes too long. Try putting a guestbook and a counter on your page. The guestbook is a great way to find out who is visiting your page and what they think of it. GeoCities offers their own guestbook, but you can also get one from Lpage, among others. Counters of course, give you the number of "hits" your page has received. That means that anytime someone stops by, BANG! there's another hit, and its recorded on your counter.

Once your page is finished, you can register it with search engines and get more hits! That way, when people search for a page on cars and your page is about drag racing, they will see your URL (Uniform Resource Locator -- in plain English, your web page address). Most search engines have directions for adding your URL on their home page. For example, at the bottom of Yahoo, you'll notice that it says, "How to include your site." For a list of Search Engines, check out the Big Search Engine Index.

There are a few things to look out for when constructing a page: one is the cheese factor. Cheesy sites are tacky looking, making readers want to leave rather than read what you have to say. Don't put blinking text and clashing colors on your page; it's distracting and makes the page hard to read. Also, don't underline everything, and don't EVER make one long page that goes on forever. Break up your site into smaller pages, and link to them from your main page. Keep your main page neat and organized, so no one gets lost! Until you are comfortable with HTML, and know exactly how you want your page to look, simplicity is the key. Simple doesn't mean boring. As you learn more, your page will slowly turn into what you can already see in your mind. You will have your own little home on the Web.

A couple of good style guides are The WebTV Networks Style Guide, The Yale Style Guide, and Crafting a Nifty Personal Web Site.

I would love to see your pages when they are "done". We all know that web pages are never really done, because they grow and change with us. E-mail us your URL and we will make a visit and sign your guest book!