I had wanted to start on a web page for some time. I had written notes for night classes and had contributed to the Hull Geological Society web-site. So one afternoon I had a go. I wrote the first page in Word (I think) and then used the Windows 98 "web publishing wizard". It worked!

From there I have gone on to write pages in Outlook Express, Netscape Composer, and Dreamweaver. I have also learnt a bit of html and sometimes edit the source and insert "meta-tags". I always find it useful to view a page in different systems to see if it works well (writing a page in one only may leave a page which does not work well with all). Though there are disadvantages - sometime an ".html" file gets converted to ".htm" and I am not sure how or why! Also, the meta-tags get truncated somehow. Perhaps someone can tell me why one day. I had a lot of trouble getting an FTP programme to work successfully and eventually worked out that they are case sensitive in the address and password!

I have expanded on to a Fortune City site which is free and easy to upload and edit files. It has a lot more (free) space for adding photos and diagrams.

I put a counter on the home page - but that is often "temporarily offline", so may not reflect the actual number of "hits".

I thought that itwas just a case of creating a site and then anyone could find it - not so! So I have been submitting the address to search engines etc. and found that "AddEngine" and "indeedhits" were very quick ways to do that. I also pick up hints from reading ".Net" magazine.

Two bits of advice I would give other would-be web-masters are firstly be very careful when you set up your site initially and use a speel-chocker before you upload pages! Think carefully about the domain/user name you choose and remember to spell them and your passwords carefully. You can rewrite your web-pages but you cannot alter your user/domain names - so if you want something "sexy" or witty don't rush into it. Also names and passwords may be case sensitive so if you miss out a capital letter you may not get back into your web-site!

The philosophy for the site is keep it simple, fancy things can slow up the pages and may not work on every body's computer. I appreciate that it is text-heavy; to some extent I have assumed that visitors will print out the pages they want to read.

(Click here for some tips about writing web-pages)

I hope you enjoy it

Cheers, Mike