Now for actually creating the pages of your website. Please consider people with less than perfect eyesight and hearing when you create your pages. The World Wide Web consortium has set up standards for web page accessibility that you may want to check out before you begin. Here's a brief synopsis of accessibility standards.

You'll need tools that will help you to build your pages:

General office tools

Many business programs such as Microsoft Word provide you with the ability to save a document as a web page. These editors don't usually produce very well constructed pages. For one thing, they don't provide you with a basic web-page-like structure, so your page may look amateurish. For another, they usually add in a lot of extra code, so your pages will be slower to load than ones created in a special website editor. If you keep your pages short, which you should do for your visitors' sake anyway, that may not be a problem. But Word was not originally designed as a web page generator, so you'll only get basic web functionality, and none of the predesigned templates or site planning and navigation tools that a web editing package will provide.

Another way of creating pages that are readable on the web is to convert them with a tool such as PDF Converter 5 . PDF files are a little slower to load into visitors' browsers, but they have the advantage of preserving a document's formatting, and Google can search their contents as well as regular web pages. You'll still need some sort of tool to link them together into a website. But you can use an inexpensive WYSIWYG tool for that (see below).

WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Software

The most widely used tool on the market for designing web pages in a visual environment is Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox . Dreamweaver has a rich array of features. It costs $199. If you are only creating one simple site, it may not be worth the investment. There are easy-to-use tools available for $35 to $59, like There are easy-to-use tools available for $49, like Web Easy Professional or CoffeeCup Big Cup , WYSIWYG tools that should fill your needs. Or consider a hosting site that provides simpler, less feature-rich online site creation tools.

You may need an additional tool, such as Form Maker if you want to build forms, surveys and other interactive pages. CoffeeCup offers a similar tool for $39.

Coding in HTML

HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language". It's the language in which web pages are written. It's not terribly difficult; it's about as hard to learn as a spreadsheet program. You will find numerous free tutorials and courses on the web to help you get started. There's a cheatsheet that will give you the basics in a nutshell. If you're more ambitious, there's a tutorial called "Build Your Own Website" at Suite101.com

You should use a website editor, such as Trellian Web Page, which is free, or CoffeeCup HTML Editor , which costs $49 but includes a WYSIWYG editor. They'll help you organize your site and provide helpful little buttons and such to do things like adding links.

Even if you code in HTML, you might want to use a pre-designed graphic template as a basis. There are thousands of templates available if you want to add a little pizazz to your pages. Many are free. Others are very inexpensive (about $35 to $50) and add a professional look to your site. For a list, see More resources.

Getting pictures

If you don't plan to use all your own photos or artwork, you will need some images to dress up your site. There are two kinds: clip art (which is usually a drawing or other art work) or stock art (which are usually photos). There are companies that still charge several dollars per photo you use, but there are also companies like 123rf.com which give away some photos and charge as little as 21 cents per photo. If you think you'll need a lot of photos and/or clip art, there are companies like iCLIPART.com that will sell you one month's unlimited access to more than 7 million clipart images, photos, photo objects, fonts, and sounds for about $20.. Make sure the art you use is "royalty free", meaning you have unlimited rights to use it.

Browse a collection of clip art and photos:

Adding Extras

• Search Engine
  Several companies, such as PicoSearch, are willing to supply you with a free search engine for your site. Of course, they show their own ads on the results, but they're nice for larger sites. Google will also supply a free search box, and will provide it ad-free for non-profit organizations such as libraries. However, they will not do an on-demand spidering (automatically tallying all of your pages), so avoid this one until your site is well established.
  
• Scripts for games, forms, calculators, special effects, etc.

  You can incorporate some programming into your pages without knowing how to program. There are sites that provide ready-written scripts like The JavaScript Resource or Webmasters Cavern. They give you the scripts to cut and paste and tell you where on the page to paste them.

• Selling things
  
  

  If you can find your way through a page of HTML, you can create BUY NOW or DONATE buttons via PayPal and insert them into your page. The signup procedure is the hardest part of the process. Be prepared for it to take a couple of weeks from start to finish, and have your bank account information handy. Once you've gone through the signup procedure, you just click on the Merchant Tools tag and fill out a simple form. They give you the code to cut and paste into your page. They'll even provide you with a shopping cart. All this is free until you sell something, which is when they take their cut of about 3%.

  If you're selling in large volume, say $1000 a month or more, you may want to consider a Merchant Account with a company other than PayPal, such as Capital Merchant Solutions. They charge a lower percentage of your selling price, but they charge a monthly minimum.

Testing

Look at all your web pages in at least two popular browsers: Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. If you're developing your pages on your local computer, you can view the pages without uploading them to your server. In your MS Explorer window, click on File > Open...> Browse... and click on the name of the HTML page. In Firefox or Netscape, click on File > Open File...

You are testing to see that the page looks good, and that all your links work.

Also,you should try the pages in different screen resolutions. To do this, on a PC, in the Start menu, click on "Control Panel", "Display" and "Settings". Slide the little slider up or down to increase or decrease the resolution.

Even once you have tested it on your PC or local server, test it again once you have uploaded it to your web server. The most experienced web developers make mistakes!

When you're all finished making sure the page looks okay, you'll need to give some thought to whether it's optimized for search engines. A good, free tool for testing that, and also for learning a lot about proper page construction, is Sitening's SEO Analyzer.

Where to Get It

Creation tools:

Non-WYSIWYG Editors

Templates

Graphics

HTML Help

Help with Design Tools

Extras

Accepting Credit Cards