Even though private companies will offer to create your home page for a fee, it is not difficult at all to set one up yourself. ALCOM accepted the challenge and established a 175 Kb home page in a very short time at extremely low-cost. Almost 90% of the text came from existing computerised documents and needed only minor reformatting. One scanned graphic was used (our logo) and a few graphs. The main cost is the storage charge of US$ 1 per 100 Kb per month on our server (ZamNet Communications Systems in Zambia). There is normally no charge for others to look at your page or download its information.
The first advise to establish a low-cost home page is to contact several servers. Your page does not necessarily have to be located in the city or country where you are working! For example, ALCOM's main office is in Harare (Zimbabwe) but the home page is located on a server in Lusaka (Zambia) and our only connection is through E-mail and FTP. For a lot of home pages it is even hard to discover where they are physically located. The most important is to find a reliable, stable and cheap server which allows you to maintain your home page by FTP. In that way you can update your information when and from where you want.
A home page can be composed of basically 4 types of files with extension htm (hypertext files), txt (text files), gif or jpg (two kinds of graphic files).
A simple page would be a regular ASCII text file (*.txt) with no links to other files or graphics. In most cases the first (title) page is an htm-file with links to other files. An htm file is a text file with simple formatting signs between brackets (< and >). Until now, most WWW-browsers allow the use of two kinds of graphic files: gif and jpg. You can use both depending on the kind of graphic you want to make available. The main criterion will probably be the size of the graphic file: in some cases a jpg format will return a smaller file, in other cases a gif file might be smaller. The size of the graphic will determine the speed at which visitors are receiving it and will probably also determine the storage cost of your page (fee you pay to keep your page on the server).
As mentioned above (2.7), a lot of shareware or demonstration software is available on the Internet and can be easily located with the help of WWW search engines. ALCOM found some interesting demonstration software by searching for “html” on the South-African FTP-sites. We ended up using a template for Win Word 6.0 to design our page but there are lots of alternatives. You certainly don't have to spend large sums on software to set up a simple home page!
Although Internet-browsers like Netscape and Mosaic are allowing more and more complicated htm-language, you can set up a nice home page with very simple html files. We explain here the basics of html (Hyper Text Markup Language, invented by Tim Berners-Lee). to assemble a page without fancy background graphics, special colors or specific font sizes. If you want to add this later on, you will be able to do this with more complete html-programs or literature.
An html-file (extension htm in DOS or html in UNIX) is an ASCII text file with simple formatting signs between brackets (< and >). Suppose you want to put the word “bread” in italics then you should include it as follows:
<I>bread</I>
The formatting sign <I> turns italics on and </I> turns it off again. All characters between < and > will not be visible when you load the htm-file with your net-browser. Most of the formatting signs need to be turned off again (</..), except for a number of paragraph formatting signs. All html-files start with <html> and end with </html>
With this knowledge and a list of formatting signs, it is possible to compose a htm-file with any regular text editor or word-processor that can save your document as a text-file.
Although it is useful to acquire this basic knowledge of htm-language, there is a way of avoiding it. The Word template that ALCOM used is one possibility. With this template you proceed as follows:
Load a regular Word document which you want to use for your home page. This document might be formatted already with bold or italic characters, different font sizes or bulleted paragraphs.
Load the html template, this will add another toolbar to your Word window.
Click the htm-code check tool button: the template will check for all existing formatting that it can translate into html-code and will add the html formatting code to your document in hidden text. For example, when finding a word in italics, it will ad <I> in front and </I> behind this word.
If you would like to, you can now add additional text and format it with the tool-buttons on the html-toolbar.
Save as html file: the template will first save the original Word-document with the html formatting signs included as hidden text and will then save the html file as a regular text-file with line breaks.
Load the htm-file with your Internet browser to verify the result.
There are only a limited number of formatting codes you have to know to be able to set up a low-cost home page. Once you understand how it works, you'll find it quite easy to modify simple things in htm-language yourself. A more complete explanation on html can be found on WWW at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb. We include an example of a simple html-file and its output in appendix 2 for your reference. The basic formatting signs are listed below:
basic character or paragraph formatting signs:
| <HTML></HTML> | start and end of HTML-file |
| <TITLE></TITLE> | title of the HTML-file (usually it is only shown in the title bar of the browser, not in the file itself!) |
| <H1></H1> | header 1 (big bold font, you can use all numbers up to <H6>, which will give you a very small bold font |
| <B></B> | bold |
| <I></I> | italics |
| <CENTER></CENTER> | center |
| <BLINK></BLINK> | blink (flashing text) |
| <DL></DL> | start en stop indenting: use <DT> and <DD> in between to indicate indent size |
| <DT> | definition list: small indent (this sign does not have to be closed) |
| <DD> | definition: bigger indent (this sign does not have to be closed) |
| <PRE></PRE> | use fixed width font instead of proportional font |
| <OL></OL> | put numbers in front of paragraphs between these tags with <LI>, this formatting sign can be nested |
| <UL></UL> | put bullets in front of paragraphs between these tags with <LI>, can be nested |
| <LI> | put number or bullet in front of this paragraph if between the appropriate bulleting or numbering formatting signs |
| <HR> | inserts horizontal line (underlined) |
| <BR> | end of line (forces line break) |
| <P> | end of paragraph tag (inserts a line space after this tag) |
Special formatting signs for links:
<A HREF =“mailto:e-mail address”> blue text with reference</A>
The text “blue text with reference” will be visible on the page, usually this will be the E-mail
address that is mentioned after “mailto:”. This gives the possibility of sending a message
directly from the home page to your mailbox.
<A HREF = “http address”>blue text with reference </A>
Once again the text in between will be visible as blue but this time it provides a link to another
html-file. “http address” can be another address on another server but it can also be just another
file in the same directory.
<A HREF = “#reference inside the document”>blue text with reference</A> referring to:
<A NAME=“reference inside the document”>title</A>
Instead of providing a link to another file, you can also give a link to a title inside the same
document. This is particularly nice when the page is very long. Be careful to use exactly the
same reference in the <A HREF=“#… statement as in the <A NAME=” statement. Referencing
is case-sensitive!
<IMG ALT=“”SRC=“name of gif or jpg-file” width=123 height=456></A>
This includes a graphics-file into your home page. If your graphic is not situated in the same
directory on the server, you should insert the directory in front of the filename:
../graphics/mylogo.gif.
The width and height statements can be left out when the original file has the right size. It is
recommended to do so, since reducing or increasing the size with Netscape will not always give
a satisfactory result. Note also that the width and height statements are only supported fully by
Netscape 1.1 and higher.
If your output on your Internet-browser is not what you wanted (e.g. everything in bold or centered,…), you will most likely have to check for a formatting code that is not closed or for a lost bracket in the text. It is in general quite easy to find such problems. The most difficult problem we experienced was the line spacing in and between paragraphs, specially with a fixed width font.
When setting up a home page you probably target a specific interest group and you want as many target group members as possible to visit your page. The number and kind of visitors you will receive will depend on:
In order to have an idea of number and kind of visitors, it might be useful to ask your server to set up a counter (of the number of visits). Your page should have a link to your E-mail address to receive direct comments, requests or other messages from visitors.
