Can I make my own page?

Okay, so you've decided that it would be best for you and your business to get your own web site. Regardless of whether you get your own domain or not, there is still the question of who is going to build the page. I've seen companies offering to build a simple site for over $500 and I've seen some desperate people who offer to build a page for $10 a page. You could go the cheap route or the expensive route, and end up with a nice site either way. Obviously with the $500 site you'd get a lot more features, but maybe that isn't what you need.

It is quite possible that since all you want on the site is some text info, you thought you might try to build your page yourself. Is that a good idea? It depends. If all you want to do is have text and graphics, then you could probably do it yourself. Both IE 4.0x and Communicator 4.0x come with excellent WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors. FrontPage Express is full of excellent features and has some good help to explain some things. Netscape Composer is very similar. Either of these programs would work fine. They have dialog boxes which help you through tables and frames.

Now remember that I said it depends. Even with all of the good features, nothing can make up for experience. I've found that when I'm using these programs, I can never get the page to look exactly how I want. When it gets close, the HTML code ends up being bloated which means the page might take an extra second to load. On the internet, every second counts. I've also found that the help for tables and frames still doesn't tell you everything. Also, if you experience problems, or want to try something new, it is possible that you might mess everything up.

To sum it all up, I'd suggest that for business purposes, it is best to hire someone to build your page. If you have a page with your ISP, then play with that and try out some things, but you can't afford to have any problems with your page, when your using it as a promotional tool.

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