Q: How do I make a neighborhood watch page?
First read:
Web Page: How to make an HTML pageNow you know what kind of web critter you want, and how it will be set up. You have your battle plan ready. Time to start thinking of customizing your plan and doing some fine tuning.
You need:
I use CoffeeCup.com for my HTML writer program, and I'm not making money by sending you there. Start out with their free writer and try a few others available online if you want as well.
... An HTML writer program on your computer.
... A domain.
... A place to host your domain.
Try Go Daddy for cheap and reliable domain registration and hosting. Check other offers online from big companies as well.
Spring for the $2.80 a month to Go Daddy right to start out with. Why? There are free hosting services out there like tripod and angelfire. You are going to hate all the advertisements you get stuck with on your "free site" and end up with a paid hosting site later anyway. By then everyone will have your old URL and they will get confused when you change it on them. You are creating a neighborhood watch site now, you want a good domain name, and something you can easily hand over to someone else if you are no longer the Webmaster a few years from now.
Open:
Lovell Neighborhood WatchWhile on that open page... at the very top of your browser screen click on the word VIEW and then the word SOURCE.
Do you see the code now that makes the web page look like it does to the reader?
Create a folder on your computer in your HTML writer program, called Watch, or something you will remember later.
Copy all the code onto a new web page and SAVE it to your watch file.
In the code text, change all of our information for yours. Where it has the name of a town, change it to yours. The same with the address, the email, etc...
Check the code in your HTML writer program in a page view often.
Save your changes often after checks.
... If you mess up and accidently remove some other code along with the name of a town or something, just click on your UNDO button in your HTML writer program.
... If you mess up really bad, swear at the computer and close the page without saving it and open it up again to start from where you were at your last save.
... If you mess up really, really bad... go back to the original web page and save the code from scratch all over again and paste it on a new page in your HTML writer and start over.
Notice that at no time did the earth stop revolving, nothing happened when you messed up. In fact, mess it up on purpose a few times. Now mess it up even more. Mess it up and fix it until you feel no stress at all in working on the code. Nothing is worse than holding your breath making a change in code. Relax and have fun with it. When you are done you will know that the code for stop typing on this line and go to the next line can be moved and cut out and added in, depending on what you want your page to look like.
Now that your information is on your web page, and you are comfortable making your own changes in the code, it's time to have more fun.
... If your favorite colors are blue and yellow, you might want to leave the dark blue background and just change the side column to the color yellow. Since you've already been playing in the code, I bet you already know that it's the BGCOLOR="#B7DBFF" at the top of that column in the code that needs to be changed. Yeah, it's really that easy. Look at many yellow codes in your HTML writer program to use in those side columns, some shades will look better than others.
... Put a photo of your home town on the page at the top of the right column, see if you like that. Make lots of changes, keeping in mind that it will always be the simple, silly mistake in code that messes up a whole page. Learn to "read" code for mistakes. Don't believe me? Remove one simple > from anywhere in your code and look at the page. Yikes, huh?
Read other pages at our Class Help section. As you learn more about code and fine tune your site, the more confident you will feel. Look up what you need to know from the help function of your HTML writer program if you get stuck. By learning to make a web page do what you want it to do in code, you will not fall into the stressful trap of the "make it easy in one night with no knowledge of code" site makers. Those all look great until you want to move something to the left or add some extra text to a section that the set format objects to. You will also quickly come to realize that most "Webmasters" out there only know the "plug and play" method of page creation. When you ask them to do something outside of the formatted look of the page, they suddenly have to take a sick Aunt on an around the world cruise. Very sad.
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