Here are some quick pointers worth remembering.

      Through my experience most people (about 80%) are using a monitor resolution of 800X600 and about 20% have a resolution of 1024X768. The rest, a small portion, are using mostly lower resolutions. This is Important as it will relate to how your page is presented. For example a page created to look good with the higher resolution may appear squeezed with text and pictures shifted around to fit the smaller resolution settings. With a little extra work a web page can be made to look good in most resolution settings. Remember to check your pages with different monitor settings, at least make the page look good at 800x600 resolution.

      The other key to building a good site is to check your work with more than one browser. Some bits of code may work well with one browser but not be understood by another browser. ie: The font blink command in Netscape causes the text to flash on and off but in Internet Explorer the text just sits there.
      If possible check your work with an older version of your browser. A lot of people will not have updated browsers, code that works with the newest version may not work with the older one.

      It is Important to keep an eye on your page sizes. The smaller you can make a page the better. You have to remember that many people are still using phone modems (slow) and if they have a long wait for a page to load they will get bored and move on. The smaller the file sizes you have on your page the better ie: JPG picture format verses the larger BMP format. A JPG picture could be 20 Kb in size but look the same as a BMP which could be 500 Kb. Any animations you may have on your page should be as small a file size as possible and still look good. For large or complex animations try using an APPLET compiler such as ANFX, Flash, ... They produce small files to control larger animations.

      Check the Software Links page to visit software sites and download demo or shareware versions of some of the programs I may mention, try before you buy. Also visit sites like tucows or cnet for freeware or shareware programs.

      If you don`t want to get a html editor you can still create HTML pages with a simple text editor like Windows Notepad. When you save the file change the file extension from TXT to HTML. Then a browser will look at the page using Hyper Text. *note most browsers will display a file with the TXT file extension, but it will show the page as plain text. Click here to see this page as a text file, basic.txt *view the source
To view the source code on any webpage put the mouse cusor over the background of the page and right click, then select View Source from the popup menu. This is great if you want to see how to do something you like on the page.

      Remember to save often and keep backups of your site preferably on CD`s or floppies.

      Keep your site well organized from the start. This will help as your site becomes larger and finding files more difficult.
      Your root directory (Your webspace address) should contain a file called index.html or index.htm. This is the page the Browser will open by default when root directory is opened. The rest of the files can be split up into other folders for example one for pictures, another for html files, another for sounds etc.