being a bit of a novice with the computer,i was feeling quite pleased with myself when i managed along with my daughters boyfriend,to create my own web site using microsoft word( well i told him what i wanted and he did it really).what i would like to know is how do i now get it put on the internet? any advice would be much appreciated.

belvior, do you want to know how to transfer the website from your PC to the server, or do you want to know how to obtain a location for your website in the first place?

The easiest way to do it is go to www.geocities.com - yes they can be a bit of a pain but they are just about the easiest way to get a page onto the internet. (It's where I started out having a page and now I have my own domain

What sort of file did you save your webpage as? A .html? Follow the instructions to UPLOAD the page into your account at Geocities.

thank you for the reply leau, in answer to your questions ,i believe its both i need to know.when i say i'm a novice,i mean it.

ladymach thank you for the pointer i'll have a look at that web site

Like I said, there are other websites but I think that Geocities may be the easiest and it's very popular.

I don't know what Internet browser you are using but if you know anyone using Netscape's, or any other Internet browser, you could perhaps ask them to look at your page with it. Maybe someone here could comment once your site is up and running. If page appearance is important, it would be good to know that people using any type of Internet browser see your page as you constructed it.

I have a web site and have spent much time adding to it and making it look OK. This is what I found when putting it together. I haven't tried writing a web page using 'Word' but the following might apply.

The joy of turning out a web page using Microsoft's Frontpage Express soon turned to disappointment when it was viewed in Netscape's browser. It didn't look anything like it did when displayed in Internet Explorer. Conversely, a page written using Netscape Composer wouldn't display properly in Internet Explorer. To overcome this I had to find a page writing application that would make pages look the same in all browsers. There are several about that will do this. I used a WYSIWYG type because you can see the page as it will look as construction takes place (like the 'Word' one). WYSIWYG stands for 'What You See Is What You Get'. Even then, it is best to have a few browsers installed so that the developing web site can be checked for correct display in all of them.

Because our site evolved over a year or so, I had both Netscape and Internet Explorer installed so I could check that the pages I was writing displayed properly in both. I also had the 'Opera' browser installed as well because this is becoming an increasingly popular one. Opera is an exacting browser when it comes to viewing a web site. It won't display pages properly that don't comform to HTML code standards (HTML code makes up a web page). If pages look as intended in 'Opera', they are likely to display the same in both Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers. Moreover, it is a good alternative browser to use. The latest version even supports 'resume' of interrupted downloads.

Another problem encountered initially was finding out how to upload the files to the server. It all seems easy now but was confusing at the time....what with unheard of terms like 'host name' and 'host type'. With much trial and error the difficulty was overcome and an early version of my website was soon available for the world to see.

This information is timely as I have just re-hashed what was the homepage of my office website, the old one was written nearly six years ago when there were so few versions of the different browsers. When I was checking it, both in the office and at home, I discovered that it viewed differently in different versions of IE.

I assume this Opera is available as a download somewhere, I shall go and look for it now. Thank you.

I have downloaded Opera and so far I like it. Normally I use Netscape as I don't like Explorer, I am going to try this for a while and see how I get on.

Thanks TW

I have used Opera as my main browser on several occasions the past but I've always gone back to Internet Explorer (version 6 now).

I have just been using the latest version of Opera to try and assess why it is I don't use it as my default browser.

I couldn't really come up with a good reason until I tried using it for our very own FT site. I found that images were slowing, or even stopping, a page from opening sometimes.

Try replying to a post to see if you experience the same thing. In my case, this is when the trouble mostly occurs.

I know that it is the various images in the page that Opera is having trouble with. When the 'reply to post' page won't open I can go into: File>Preferences>Multimedia and opt to only display cached images (or turn them off entirely). When this change is applied the 'reply to post' page will then load but is lacking a post icon or two.

This is only theory at present but I think the reason for this might be because the FT pages are made up of tables. Perhaps Opera will not display the page content unless all elements within the table are present. If for some reason it has trouble locating and icon (or anything) it will not display the page. I will probably e-mail Opera to ask about this.

Internet Explorer seems have no trouble in this respect. Just in case this problem with Opera is individual to me I'd be interested to hear what you find.

I just downloaded and installed Opera to try it out, and I have the same problem. Some pictures aren't showing up at all. Changing the multimedia-settings did the trick and on my computer no post icon are missing...

I still prefer Netscape or IE though.

It's interesting that there are no post icons missing when you change the option to cached images only. Perhaps this is because the images needed have been already been cached. Maybe it always looks for images again if the 'show images' box is checked and then subsequently gives trouble opening the page.

I think I prefer Internet Explorer too but since Opera has quite a following it's maybe best to make sure that any pages written for a web site look OK in it. Also, Opera provides a good check to ensure that the HTML code being written will display the same page lay-out in both IE and Netscape.

Then, of course, there are many other browsers around that we all hope our web pages display properly in but well, you can't check them all. Three browsers installed on a computer is enough I'd say!

I'm sure I've seen programs around that try to simulate different different browsers but I always prefer to to check out pages in the actual browsers.

It's a good thing I installed Opera. I'm "in charge" of my club's website and found out that the list items I've used don't display properly in Opera... Don't know why though.

Usually the reason is that table widths have been specified in pixels rather than percentages. Try looking at the table properties to see if this is the case.

Also, as if life were not complicated enough, this factor often causes problems for those viewing your web pages in a lower screen resolution than the one you are using. So it's often best to switch screen resolutions occasionally to see if the table fits into the screen at a lower resolution.

For a table to shrink or grow depending on screen resolution they need to be set in percentages. Sometimes specifying a table height is something else that Opera may not like. It also wont display small tables properly that do not have enough cell padding. Please forgive me if you know already know about all this.


It isn't always easy to spot what is wrong but it makes an absorbing mind game. I nearly always win.

What editor are you using?

The table size is already specified in percentages... The point is that I'm not the one who designed the website and to get familiar with the site the first thing I did was reading through all the HTML code. It's not always as well-structured as one would hope, since several previous webmasters have added their share of code.

The editor I use most of the time is simply Notepad, sometimes MS Frontpage or a PHP editor. Installed Dreamweaver recently, but haven't had time yet to give it a try.

My screen resolution is 1024x768, that's not so high, is it? (I was out of money after buying all the components needed to build my new computer, so I sticked to my tiny old monitor )

I use the <li> command, so maybe that's not acceptable in Opera? I'm pretty sure that no one in my club is even aware of Opera's existance, so I've had no complaints so far, but now it's bugging ME!

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Please forgive me if you know already know about all this.

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No need for apologies! It's always good to hear it again, and this way it's useful to others as well! I didn't know all of it, btw. What is cell padding?

I know that Opera is fairly particular about how pages are constructed. I have never used anything using the <li> tag but that could be the reason.

Maybe the best thing to do is to open the pages in in Dreamweaver, see what they are like and then edit them in that.

The only thing I've heard about Dreamweaver is that it sorts out automatically what it sees as bad code. This might be a good thing until you actually want to break the rules. Then it may not let you.

I use Namo WebEditor 4 (5 is available now). It is very much like Dreamweaver but less expensive. Even so sometimes things still have to be altered a bit to suit Opera.

As regards that, I suppose it does have quite a number of followers. However, the percentage of people using it as their default browser must be relatively small compared to IE or Netscape.

Nonetheless, as you say, it is annoying to find that a web page won't display properly in it. It always sends me off searching for a reason why.

Cell padding is where a table has several cells with perhaps each cell containing an image (buttons maybe). The padding stops the images being too close together. It behaves roughly the same way as cell spacing. Padding separates images by internally padding each cell and spacing works by spacing the cells apart.

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The only thing I've heard about Dreamweaver is that it sorts out automatically what it sees as bad code. This might be a good thing until you actually want to break the rules. Then it may not let you.

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Exactly the reason why I usually prefer notepad over Frontpage! But Dreamweaver helped me out in this case and the list items look fine now in Opera as well!!! I think Opera requires more accurate programming, whereas IE and Netscape are used to people making a "mess"... I put a font definition before the <p> and it turned out I shouldn't have.

Well, everything solved. Thanks, tellywellies!! Now I don't have to lose any sleep over it!

Leau I use <li> on my office website and it views OK in Opera, I have just checked it, views perfectly. I will PM you the url so you can check to see if it views OK for you. The page I will send is a table with three columns, the list is within the table.

That's good. You wouldn't think that something so simple as an unwanted <p> could upset things would you?

Oops! I misread. You said it was a font definition before the <p> but anyway it's still a small thing.

*Edit* Oops!......etc.

Sue - Can I have a look at that too. I'm always interested to see code in operation that I haven't used myself before. It'll save me hunting the web.

So I'm not the only one doing that! Whenever I encounter a complicated looking website, I dig through the source code!!

That is how I taught myself html in the first place, I looked at site, checked the source code then copied bits that I wanted to use. Then I found out that you could print off a primer!

I will send you the url. It is a three column table with a list in the centre panel which is spanning six rows. For good measure I have changed the background colour in two of the columns, and the text colour.

Yeah, source code is how I learned how to do images from sites other than my own and frames.

But now I refuse to do frames - I hate those things!

There's much of debate over the use frames. Sometimes they can be a good thing when it comes to a menu that always needs to be on display. It saves loading that menu every time the page is changed. However, the main complaint is that you can't bookmark individual pages in a frameset.

I think that if you have a non-information sort of site that is likely to get looked at but not returned to then frames are probably OK since the pages are not likely to be bookmarked.

On the other hand perhaps an information site, where you might want to bookmark a page and be sure that this is the exact page you'll come back to when clicking it, can be a bit inconvenient when it is the frameset that appears and not the page you wanted.

My own site used to be frames. It consisted of several framesets accessible from both the homepage and from all framesets. A bit of careful planning ensured good navigation of it. Then again, apart from one section, it is only a general interest site and not the sort of one that would be bookmarked anyway.

Even so, I re-designed the site without them some time ago to keep it simple. Navigation is done now by links on the individual pages or by way of a java applet menu that appears on each page. I'm thinking about doing away with this last aspect because it is a bit slow to load and I'm not sure that many people would use it.

This is my web site

You can spend quite a time on that site Martin - I am still giggling at Bahrain and the bucket!