How to make your own webpage

Making a home page is trivial, and junior-high-school kids are doing it all over the country. Here's a quick way to get started:

Use netscape and find a page someplace on the web that you would like to use as a template for your own page (you can use another browser, too, but I don't know the commands you need to use, so I'll stick to netscape). I've made a simple page and a more advanced simple page for you to use which has most of the commands from the latest greatest html spec 3.2 that you will use.
Do "file" "save as" to save that page someplace at ipac, and make sure you put ".html" as the file extension. If there are images on that page, they won't be saved, and you shouldn't steal them anyway unless they are in the public domain. (If they are, save them by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save this image as".)
Use your favorite editor, and replace what you don't want with what you do want. The html commands are all in brackets like this: <command>, so don't mess with them until you understand a bit more about them. But you will quickly learn the main ones:

<p>
start a paragraph
<h1>
start a header of size 1, which is the biggest.
</h1>
end the header

In general, most html commands must be "ended" with the / as above, except for a few such as <p>. A bunch of optional information can go in the header part of the document <head> to </head> but the main stuff goes in the <body> until </body>.
View your creation in netscape by opening this url:
file:/home/your.user.name/where.ever.you.put.your.file.html
Iterate by viewing the file, finding what you don't like, edit the file, and click reload or alt-r to reload the file in netscape. Do until you are happy.

That is all there is to it! For further information, here are two links: HTML Quick Reference (8/20/96) and NCSA--A Beginner's Guide to HTML Home Page. If you want to look up every single html command currently in existence, go to HTML 3.2 Reference Specification for the latest, greatest info. A great index of every command and all of their options is at A Compendium of HTML Elements.

Also see Guidelines for Maximum Size of a Webpage, which also contains links to style and design guides.

I am always willing to help IPACers with this or any other matter, but of course am not always available "down the hall" (;-)
You can always send me an email.

Thanks to Tom Chester for this tutorial. -tj