Step 1: Writing a Home Page

Use any text editor or an html editor on your computer to create a document called index.html (or temporarily index.htm if your system doesn't support long filenames). Make sure you save it as plain ASCII text. Editors such as notepad (Windows), edit (DOS), pico (UNIX), or SimpleText (Mac) are fine if you don't have an HTML editor program.

For ideas on how to write your page, or for ideas on what to include, look at other people's home pages. Find a menu option like View Source in your browser to display the HTML code that created the page you are seeing. Many sources of further information about creating HTML are available all over the internet; a good start is Netscape's Assistance page on Creating Net Sites. More in-depth coverage can be found at sites such as the Web Developer's Virtual Library.

HTML Editors

Most programs in the category of HTML editors are simply helpers. You do not need one in any way to create HTML. The ways they help range from just inserting tags to checking that your HTML is valid. If you're not sure if you want or need one, the best thing is to establish some familiarity with HTML first. After that, these reviews cover the advantages, peculiarities, and downloading locations of many popularly available HTML editors.

Step 2: Uploading Your home Page

First you need a special directory created under your account at Cyber Internet Services, Inc. to store your HTML pages and make them accessible to the rest of the internet. Go to Cyber Internet Service, Inc.'s User Services page and follow the link to create you a public_html directory. When created, it will be accessible from a web browser as http://www.cyberis.net/~username, where username is your login name. For your information, when you log into Cyber Internet Services, Inc.'s FTP server, the path will actually be /home/u/username/public_html/, where u is the first letter of username which is your login name.

Note that this directory is physically located on our server, ftp.cyberis.net (not your home computer, so you don't have to be connected to the internet for people to view your web page). You must use an FTP program such as WS_FTP or equivalent to connect to ftp.cyberis.net. If you don't have an FTP program, try TUCOWS. When you run your FTP program, enter ftp.cyberis.net in the box for Host Name, and log in using your User ID and Password. It will automatically put you in your home directory /home/u/username/, where u is the first letter of username which is your login name. Double click on your public_html directory (if you don't see it, you missed a step above). Now you're ready to upload your HTML files (if for some reason you see public_html listed as a file, not a directory, make sure your FTP program is configured to show links as directories). When uploading, be sure that you change index.htm to index.html after you upload it, if necessary. Also remember to keep the directory structure parallel, if you have divided your web files into subdirectories. If you ever want to add or update files, make the changes to the files on your computer, then upload them again as before.

HTML Tip: if you use several pages (files) in your website, you don't have to write the entire URL in local links to those pages. If the other file is in the same directory as the page that contains the link, you can omit everything but the filename. Same for subdirectories.

Step 3: Test Your Home Page

To check to see if your page works, go to its URL, which will be http://www.cyberis.net/~username/ (where username is, of course, your login name). If you get a 404 Not Found error, first verify that you followed all instructions for creating a public_html directory. If it's there, make sure that you have a file named index.html in the directory you get to by clicking on public_html.

If you are totally clueless at this point, you may consider having Cyber Internet Services, Inc. design and take care of your page for you (see above). If it works, congratulations, you now have a home page! Tell your friends about it, then have Cyber Internet Services, Inc. add it to our user pages listing!