STEP-BY-STEP

Create your own website

Make your presence known on the net by building your own website. We show you how

We've put together a step-by- step guide to building your own website using Adobe PageMill - one of the most popular website design programs for the PC, and also a Computeractive But It! award winner. Bear in mind that other web-design programs will work very differently, and even within PageMill itself, there are several different ways to go about creating and customising your web pages. Here's how to knock up a simple website in a few easy steps.

STEP 1
After installing PageMill on your system, you should be able to start the program in Windows by going to Start, Programs, Adobe and selecting Adobe PageMill 3.0. Close the new page that PageMill automatically presents you with when you begin the program. Then, from the toolbar, select Site and New.

STEP 2
The next stage is to choose a name for your site and a location to keep it in. At the moment you're not online, so save the site in a new folder somewhere on your hard disk. Click on Create.

STEP 3
In our website folder (H:\articles\webdesign\murray) we have saved some image files that we might want to include somewhere in our site. These will appear in the Site Details box on the right of the screen. On the left-hand side there is a Site Overview box that shows you the current properties for your site in a Windows Explorer-style list. At this stage of the exercise you haven't created any pages or links, so there won't be much to look at here just yet.

STEP 4
Close down the Site Details box by clicking the 'X' in the right- hand corner. Now choose Edit and Preferences from the tool bar. You'll be faced with a dialogue box with several tabs in it. Select the Page tab and you'll be able to set your preferred text colours, background images and so on. The default text colour is black but you can change this using the drop-down lists on this screen. You can also choose a simple background colour or, as we have done. choose an image file to be the background on your web page. Now, every time you create a new web page for your site, it will have the same defaults. Although you can alter these from within each page (see Step 8), keeping the same defaults will help your pages have a sense of continuity within your overall website.

STEP 5
Choose File and New Page from the toolbar. This will bring up a new web page with your chosen backdrop. At this point you can enter and arrange text and images in the way that you wish them to appear on the page. Explore the tool bar along the top of the new page. There are tools for creating and resizing text boxes or importing image files. These tools work much like a standard word processor, so they're quite easy to get the hang of. Use these to get your page looking just right.

STEP 6
You can preview your work at any point by clicking in the Toggle Preview Mode button in the top right-hand corner of the web page box. This will show you what your page should look like when viewed in a web browser.

STEP 7
Once you have created a few pages like this, you can create links from one to another. All you need to do is right-mouse click on the object or text that you want to use as a link and then select Make Link. A dialogue box will appear from which you can choose the page you wish to link to.

STEP 8
To customise any of your page defaults from within the page itself, you can open up the handy Inspector window by selecting Show the View menu. Using the Inspector you can easily alter the basics of each page, such as text colour and background. Here we have changed the colour of linked text to pink to make it stand out more. We've also changed the active link colour to black. Finally. it's best to preview the page to view your changes. Try clicking on a link. It should take you directly to the page the link refers to.

STEP 9
Now comes the real test. Open up your preferred web browser and choose Work Offline. Then go to the File menu and open up the home page of your new website. It should all look and function in the same way as it does in the PageMill Preview mode. If it doesn't, then don't worry as all browsers work differently and there are bound to be a few discrepancies. A little fine-tuning in PageMill's Editing mode should sort out any problems.Keep testing until you get it right.

STEP 10
Back in PageMill, check your website for errors by choosing Site and then Show Statistics. On the Site Resources tab, make sure that Errors reads zero. Also make sure that the overall file size of your site doesn't exceed the amount your service provider allows. Now you're ready to unleash your website onto the internet for the whole wide world to see.

STEP 11
Right-mouse click on your website folder in the Site Overview window, choose Edit Site Settings from the menu. To actually post your site on the web you'll need to enter the same username and password that you use to log on to the internet. At this point, it's worth liaising with the support team for your service provider in order to make sure that all the information you are entering here is correct.

STEP 12
Then it's simply a matter of selecting Site and choosing Upload from the menu.
This will kick your modem into gear, connect you to your internet service provider and upload your site onto the web. Make a note of the internet address you are assigned to and then hand it out to all your friends. Congratulations! You are now a part of the cyber-revolution!