Help with Html and maintaining your web site

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step - ancient Chinese proverb

Your shoe lace is untied - anonymous

Acquiring a few fundamental skills will make you exponentially more productive. In today's computer age, you must have adequate skills to function in the business world. This document guides you along.

The best way to use this document is to first skim through the whole thing. Then go back to the start. Go through each paragraph and if you need more help, go to the references.

1. You must be proficient using your PC. You must understand basic computer terms. You must understand drives, directories and files. You must be able to navigate around, create, copy, change and delete them. If you do not know how to do these things go to the Bronze documents and see the document 10 Tips for Managing Your Hard Drive, or spend a couple hours in a computer class.

2. Html is simple. One day we might write an Html guide. In the meantime get this documentation.
   1. Go to Internet documents and see the document Bare Bones Guide to Html. This document has a list of the basic Html tags.
   2. Go to Netscape, then go to their developers page, then documentation page, then look for documentation for Html. You can download for free the complete Html reference.

3. The essentials of Html are this. Html uses tags to tell browsers how to format the screen. A tag is a word or letters enclosed in brackets formed by the greater and less than signs. For example, to make a paragraph you put a P tag around your text. To make some text in the paragraph bold, you put a B tag around that text, like this.

   <P>First sentence of paragraph. <B>Make this bold</B> Last sentence of paragraph.</P>

   Which ends up looking like this.

   First sentence of paragraph. Make this bold. Last sentence of paragraph.

   All you need to do is learn a few tags and you can start writing Html documents. The Bare Bones Guide mentioned above lists the tags you will use most often.

4. You will need some software. Go to the Internet software page and download what you need. Much is free. Following are some tips.
   1. Editor - to create and make changes to your pages. We like to use Wordpad (same as Write), which comes with Windows. This is all you need, but if you want programs with more features Arachnophilia is a nice, free Html editor. There are also links to commercial WYSIWYG editors.

   2. Ftp client - this program lets you upload and download files from your web site. Windows comes with a command line Ftp client, but you will probably want a graphical one. Download the free LeechFtp program.

   3. Graphics - if you want to manipulate graphics you need a graphics program. Paint Shop Pro is reasonably priced and has lots of features. You may already have one that came with your computer or scanner.

5. Look at what others do. While surfing the Internet, if you want to see how someone did something, click your right mouse button on the page and then click View Source. Take a look at this document too.

Go back to the start of this document. Work through each paragraph one at a time. Go to the references and download the documentation and programs. Try to use each program. These instructions may seem daunting. However, if you take one step at a time and work your way through you will make a great deal of progress without too much pain. You might even have a little fun.