So you want to tell your in-laws that you have a home of your own? You may have to wait a while before you get one on terra firma. But dont worry, you can get one on the information highway tomorrow, and without spending a penny especially if all you want is to have your mug and a souped-up cv on the net.
Building a home on the net is alluringly easy if you have a DIY temperament. All you need is a few hours on the net and adequate planning. Alternatively, you could go to a web page designer who could charge you anything beginning from Rs 4,000, depending on the complexity of the task. Assuming that you dont want to spend that kind of money, heres what you can do.
First of all, we assume that you have a certain amount of surfing experience. If that is not the case, get an experienced surfer to help you out with what follows.
You can search the net for free homepage providers, but our choice of services should be adequate. Tripod (www.tripod.com), Geocities (www.geocities.com) and Angelfire (www.angelfire.com) are some of the more popular providers who offer you free services.
To create a homepage, you have to access the web site of the homepage provider you choose. The first two offer you a hard disk space of two megabytes. That is uaually adequate for most personal or small business websites. Angelfire offers you just 200 KB of disk space, so choose this only if your ambitions are low. Of course, all three services let you buy more hard disk space if you need it.
Free homepages are usually made on-line i.e., while you are connected to the net. This means that you have to rely on an internet account-holder and borrow his time. Alternatively, you can approach a cybercafe or club where the operators will help you out.
All the three providers have an icon on the screen which asks you to click it to create your free homepages. The process is usually interactive you can key in the text material on-line. But it is always a good idea to use a wordprocessor to key in the main text matter, and then paste into the area that your browser displays.
The page should have a title and a headline, and some text. The title and headline should describe what the page is all about in a line this is important, as internet search engines often read the title and headline for clues to index a page.
You can even add images to your page. If you are a photographer, for example, you will need to get your photographs scanned and converted into GIF or JPG formats. And you will need to upload the files using file transfer software again, something many will need help with.
But if good design is all that you are looking for, it is easy to take your pick from the collection of backgrounds and decorative icons that the services offer you. Some even offer the facility of including a counter that displays the number of visitors to your page.
All sites let you create multiple pages, and the ability to link them together. If you have a website with multiple pages in mind, it is a good idea to draw up a site plan. Then you can use the first page as a contents page, where clicking on the hyperlinked text will take you to other pages.
For the more experienced, all three offer the facility to code your page manually something that many users would prefer to stay away from. All three also offer you the facility to upload the pages that you can create in your computer using web page designing software this is again strictly for the experienced user.
Creating a website is only the first part of the process. Even websites on which lakhs of rupees were spent often languish in oblivion. So make sure that you advertise your site. Begin with printing the website address on all office stationery and visiting cards. Submit the address of your site to as many search engines as possible.
After all, you dont expect visitors to start flowing in the moment you build a house, do you?
