So, everyone wants a web site. It seems everyone has one these days. Of course, if everyone else has one, you must get one too. After all, it's cool. Someone once said that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." A web site is instant publishing. Instant distribution of ideas all over the world.

Now that you've been seduced/intimidated by some actor on TV screaming "WORK THE WEB" into wanting your own web site, and you bought the latest version of a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editor, you are just itching to unleash your shrine to Jet Li upon an unsuspecting cyber-world. Not so fast, junior. You have to learn HTML. Learning HTML is crucial if you want to publish web pages. You'll need to understand HTML in order to help you design web pages. There will come a day when your WYSIWYG web page editor just won't do what you want. For us, that day came three days after we started to work with our web page editor. While there will be examples of HTML code, this site is not a place to learn HTML. There are many good sites for learning HTML, some of them are even listed in our resources page. Go visit them, we'll wait.

Welcome back. Let's begin. Before you even launch your web page editor, you need to figure out why you are making the web site and what your web pages are going to look like.

Let's tackle the first one first, let's figure out why you are creating the web site in the first place.

Ready? Fill in the blanks; "I want to create a web site in order to..." Let's use this site as an example. We wanted to create a web site to help people make better web pages.

Next, we'll need to figure out who will come to your site. In other words, who do you want to see your site. Will it be your friends? Your enemies? Or rabid Jet Li fans who own every one of his movies on video? In our case, it is people who want to improve their web pages.

Now come the easy part, deciding on the content for your web pages. Once you figure out why and who you are making the web site for, the content should pretty much take care of itself. The hard part is organizing the content into a web site. We put down ideas for content for this site on index cards (one idea per card) and then sorted those cards into piles of related ideas, and sorted the cards in those piles in order of importance. Once you do the same, you will end up with a structure for your web site. With each card or pile translating into a single web page.

You should now have everything you need to build your web site, except for the "look and feel" of the web site. The easiest way is to pick a theme and design around it. It is best to sketch it out first before you fire up that text or web page editor. We sketch out this site in a paint application before we ever put down one line of HTML code. The advantage of sketching out the look of the site in a paint application is that most of your graphics on your web pages are done by the time you finish sketching out your pages.

Whoa, wait a minute. Some of you may be asking what happened to the bit about organizing and creating a site map and making a flow chart? Well, look over at those piles of index cards. You have already sorted them in some kind of order. That is your flow chart. That is your site map. All the work was done while you were sorting. Neat, isn't it?