Choose an Editor and a Template

The first page you want to create is your homepage. You can either use the easy site builder tool that comes with your hosting service, use a tool like FrontPage or Dreamweaver that lets you see the page as you build it, or you can use HTML. If you choose to use HTML you can create the code using an HTML editor on your computer or you can use the HTML editor that comes with your hosting service. I'm going to concentrate on using HTML to create a Web site. Some HTML editors are free, some are not. I'm using Note Tab to create my pages.

First you will need to decide on a layout for your site, what do you want your page to look like? Do you want a simple page or do you want something with two or three columns? What kinds of colors do you want to use?

Once you decide what you want your page to look like you will need to find a template that you like or build your own page from scratch. I have a few templates you can use on this site and About's Web Design site has some too. I am using the 3 column template.

Open your HTML editor. Highlight the code for the template. Copy and paste the code into your HTML editor. Save the template and call it something like "template.html". Then do a "Save As" and save it again with a name something like "home.html" or "homepage.html".

That's it for today. Next time we will fill in the "homepage.html" template and create your page.