Internet Beat

Lisa Santiago-Tyler

How I Created My Own (Free) Website

It all started late one afternoon in my backyard. My son, Mason, was napping and I was doodling in the new sketchbook I had recently bought for myself. By the time my toddler awoke, I had completed eleven rough pencil sketches. The next day during naptime, I colored them for fun. Not being an artist, I spent the rest of the day feeling most impressed with myself. They were cute... if I did say so myself. So cute in fact that I decided to show them to Mason's grandparents, Jim and Nikki, at our next visit.

When they saw them, Jim said the sketches were "charming". As a surprise for me the next day, Jim copied the drawings with his new computer scanner and using a PowerPoint program, arranged the drawings in a slide show. I had no idea computers could do such a thing. Together, we printed out the scanned images on high quality paper. I decided to add words. I knew Mason liked rhymes, so I grouped them into sets of two and made up simple sentences with rhythmic meter. Using text blocks, I fit the words under the corresponding pictures. Then, we reprinted the scanned images with the new added dialog underneath. Suddenly, my backyard sketches had become a children's book and the new PowerPoint slide show with added dialog boxes was so professional in appearance that even I couldn't believe it was my own work! I showed such an interest in what we had done that for Christmas, Jim and Nikki bought me my own computer. I was ecstatic about the possibilities.

In January of this year, I made a friend from Venezuela named Juan Jorge Alvarez. On the drive to and from the yoga class we took together, he told me about his website that he had created before coming here to the United States. I had heard a little about some Internet services offering web pages but was under the impression that you had to know a complex computer language called HTML. I knew I didn't know it and so for me, a website seemed out of the question --- something that was going to cost me money to have to learn and being a single parent…well, that just wasn't going to happen. That's when Juan Jorge told me that I didn't need to know fancy computer language to have my own website. I could use a free service through Homestead http://www.homestead.com/ . All I had to know was how to drag and click with my computer mouse. Well, it sounded easy enough and to my great surprise, it was. I decided to create a website that would feature my new children's book. My hope was that if I could get enough people to read it on-line and demand it, then I would have more bargaining power to be able to persuade some publisher someplace to publish it. Sure, it was far fetched but stranger things have happened…and my book was good. It was really good and I believed in it.

The Homestead server was very easy. First, I had to login and give myself an address. I would suggest that unlike me, the address of your site be something simple and short. I didn't realize how important that was until later on and by then it was too late for me to change it. Once you choose an address for your site with Homestead, it cannot be changed. The contents of your web site can be changed, but the address itself cannot. Next, I had to create a homepage for my site. The Homestead menu allows for many different options here. It even offers pre-structured pages that you can simply fill in with your stuff. I preferred to start with just a blank page. Because I wanted to gear the site towards toddlers and young children, I used basic colors and shapes. I wanted something that my child could enjoy. While fancy graphics were available, I thought that would be too busy for my two-year-old. So, I kept it simple. Blocks. Stars. Bold, basic colors.

Next, I decided to give the site a name: Poree's Playhouse. Poree was the name of a stuffed dog I had as a child. I thought it was fitting. Then, I began importing the pictures from my book that were saved on a disk. A word of advice here, too: PowerPoint allows you to save pictures at different resolution levels. This is just a fancy way of saying it can save something at a very high quality level (great for printing out my drawings on paper) or at a lower quality level (ideal for a web site). The reason for this is because the computer has more condensed little squares to fill with color in a high-resolution picture, whereas in a low-resolution picture the little squares (or 'pixels' as they are called) are bigger. Because there is less space to fill with color in a low-resolution image, you get a faster download. This is a good thing to know.

Importing is easy although it takes patience because you have to do each image individually. Just click on the box that says import. The computer will ask you where you want to import from. As you recall, my images were on a diskette. I clicked the picture of the diskette or A-drive and boom ----there was my picture on the page. I added text, borrowed some of Homestead's graphics, and connected all of my pages together using what the computer calls links.

I decided to add some children's health information to my site since I figured it was unlikely a young child could view the site without an adult. I linked some of my related short stories to major children's health sites that I found out about through Nikki, who is also, a registered nurse. In this way, I was able to connect my site to other sites on the World Wide Web and become a participant of the great global net…all for free!

In all fairness, I have to say that Homestead is not the only server that offers free web sites. It is the only one I personally have worked with. Among some of the numerous other servers that offer free web sites are:

You are certainly welcome and encouraged to choose any server you wish. My friend, Juan Jorge, claims to have checked out all of the others and swears that this one is the easiest. I have no reason to doubt him, although not having worked with the other servers, I really wouldn't know. You can find others by entering "Free web sites" on your search engine. While you're playing around with your computer, be sure and stop by my own web site, Poree's Playhouse. You can get there by typing the following address on your computer. http://masonelliott.homestead.com/ustarthere.html

I hope you like it!

Miss Santiago-Tyler graduated from Southwest Texas State University in 1992. She has a BA in Speech Communication and is a prolific writer. She is a fourth generation Seguinite.

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