So you got yourself an Internet connection. Sleep became something other people did while you surfed through countless sites, emailed your friends overseas and chatted online.

Now you want to join the ranks of the elite, you want to put a little flag in cyberspace with your name on it, mark out your territory, show that you have been there, done that. You want a homepage, only thing is, you have no idea how.

Well, come in, pull a chair, dose on caffeine and we will see what we can do about that.

I. Why, What and Who

Firstly, you need to ask yourself what your homepage is. Your personal stage, for the poetry you’ve been privately hoarding? A virtual photo-album, with pictures from your travels? Maybe you want to build a shrine to your fav TV show, or is your page about, well… you.

Most personal homepages tend towards the last; a resume-style fact-sheet with tons of links to “my favourite sites”. Surely, though, you can do better than that. Choose a topic, any topic, and make that the focus of your site. After all, your friends either already know your life story, or couldn’t care less about it, so you can reserve that for a small “about me” page, even skip it altogether.

You want hits, you want clicks, you want visitors to raise your hit counter pass the thousand mark. And you need to have a topic for that.

II. How

There are two ways to actually transform your ideas into a webpage. The first is to actually learn HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language), which is not as intimidating as it sounds, but does require some spare time. The second, and admittedly, easier way is to get a web editor – Adobe’s PageMill and Microsoft’s FrontPage, for example – and let it do the work while you concentrate on content and design.

You can learn HTML from several sites on the Net. HTML, basically, is a series of tags placed in your text to format it. For example, to turn a line into italics, you simply put a in front of the line, and a closing behind it. Fairly simple, though overwhelming at first.

The main benefit of using a program is, of course, convenience. While learning the code allows you to do all the bells and whistles, more impressive, and more work.

III. The Layout

Either way, now that you have the means to create a webpage, you need a webpage to create. Having chosen your topic, think out the basic formatting in your head, or draw it out, if you prefer.

Your main page will have your introduction, saying what this page is for and, briefly, what your visitors can expect to find. Say your page is about collecting phonecards, your pages could be 1) how to sort and preserve your phonecards, 2) what to look out for when collecting new cards, and 3) useful links. Or if your page is about your favourite television show, then Page One could be an episode guide; Page Two, brief bios on the main stars; and, finally, your links.

Good navigation is essential, as you do want people to visit as much of your site as their attention span allows. Pages too many layers deep (as Page A is two layers from the main page) will get fewer visitors.

IV. The Look and Feel

The best websites have an individual feel to them, and it is this identity that makes them unique from the thousands of other sites that make up the web.

Your colours, fonts and the basic style of your pages should remain constant throughout your site, and while your content can be as formal or humorous as you like, avoid using radically different writing styles between pages.

Good identity and navigation help make a page memorable. And use a spell checker.

V. Design and Codification

Remember that the way you view your page is not the same as everyone else. Your potential visitors use two different browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator – across different screen sizes with variants on the number of colours and fonts available.

To minimise distortion of your page, avoid using the non-basic fonts (any font that did not come with your system), or list alternate fonts. Your background image should also meld nicely with itself (the right side should merge neatly with the left), since browsers on larger screen sizes may get an oddly chequered background otherwise.

Make sure that your font reads well on your background colour, after all, if someone has to stress their eyes on your site, well, someone else’s site is a mouse click away.

Keep your pages within reasonable length (Two A4 pages when printed, at most), and keep graphics to a minimum. You do not need an animated image to tell people where to email you, if they want to, they will just as easily look for the text link. A small image’s filesize could be bigger than the page itself, and will slow down loading by that much more time. Of course, a page totally without graphics could be boring – just make sure that each image you use contributes to the overall ‘feel’ of the page; otherwise, it is redundant.

If you have a lot of images, say a photo-gallery, it is best to create an ‘index page’ with ‘thumbnails’ – smaller images – which link to a separate page with the full sized image. Give your visitors the option to load the bigger picture only if they want to.

VI. Putting it on the Web

With your page done, you need to find a place to store it. Your ISP gives you a meg or two of space, which is usually enough, or you can try one of the free host services (GeoCities, xoom.com, FortuneCity) which give lots of space and other perks, but put ads on your page.

VII. Getting the Hits

Go to a few search engines, and submit your site to them.

And there you go.

Been there, done that, designed the homepage.

Review : Adobe PageMill 3.0

Adobe’s PageMill is an elegantly simple WYSIWYG web creation program, a word processor for the www.

Brilliantly easy to use; inserting an image is as simple as dragging it off a window and into PageMill. Create tables, frames and forms with a click of a button, and you can import files directly from Microsoft Office.

It also has excellent site management tools; rename a page, for example, and all the links to that page on your site is automatically updated, and it checks for broken links within your entire site.

My personal favourite is the Publish function, which uploads your updated site to the web without you having to master a confusing FTP program, even synchronises folders on your server and your harddisk.

It also comes with Photoshop LE, the Internet version of the popular software, and thousands of images, Java applets and other ’lil things for your webpage.

The current version, 3.0, is available for Windows95/98 and Macintosh.