Building a philosophy free site on a free host

On this page you'll find a step-by-step guide to creating a philosophy site on a free host. The free host I've used is geocities from yahoo. This is for no particular reason many other free hosts are just as good. The first thing I did was to sign up for a free account. The name I chose was design_philosophy. The name you choose is important because that is going to be the name people see when they find your site:

e.g. http://www.geocities.com/design_philosophy

Okay, once you've signed up you need to access the HTML editor. HTML or HyperText Mark-up Language, is a bunch of tags that tell a web-browser how your site is meant to be displayed. For example, if you want a word to be in bold you put the tag <b> before the word and </b> after the word. When your browser reads the word it knows to put that word in bold.

Let's look at the html editor. The screen-shot below shows us what the editor looks like.

philosophy

You will need to put your filename in the box at the top left of the screen. The very first page you want your visitors to see must be called index.htm. The title of the page, that you see right at the top of every web page goes between the <title> tags. Your heading (this page's is "Building a Philosophy free site on a free host") is known as the <h1> title. You want to put your heading between two <h1> tags. For example if your page is on Jean Paul Sartre you want to put your title like this:

<h1>The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre</h1>

See the diagram:

philosophy

Fill in your title, and add a <h1> heading and your site will look like this

Now you want to add some text. With html you need to specifiy that chunks of text go into paragraphs. If you write into the html editor like you write into a word processor you will get something like this

To have the text seperated into paragraphs you need to seperate the paragraphs with the <p> tags. You must stick a <p> before the text begins and a </p> where you want a paragraph break.

Copy and paste this under your <h1> heading tag

<p>Free web hosting has the major advantage of being free! Often all you need to get your site hosted is to enter your choosen username, password and an email address. Free hosts such as Yahoo's geocities have an html editor which means that you can create your site without having to use an external FTP program. This means you could create a site and host it after a couple of hours in your college or university computer room. </p>

<p> The disadvantage of free hosting is that you will only get a limited service. The amount of webspace will be smaller than you will get with a paid host and you will also be given less bandwidth. You probably won't be allowed your own domain name (yourdomain.com) and you won't have your own email account (yourchoices@yourdomain.com). Probably most importantly is that with free hosting you will get little or no support from your host.</p>

</p> With a paid host, you should expect your support emails answered within a few hours of sending them. When you have a free host you won't get much in the way of support. Furthermore, with a free host you can not be guaranteed your site won't go down. Okay, no host will guarantee that your site will not go down (be unavailable to surfers) but paid hosts will offer guaranteed minimal downtime. Why is downtime so important? Well, if your site is down no-one can see it and your regular visitors might think you've taken your site down and never come back.</p>

<p> Bare in mind also that even if your site is only down for a short while you can lose your search engine position. Not only that but because of this some webmasters are reluctant to link to your site. Why? Because people will link to you in return for a reciprocal link, if your site is going to keep going down then your link to them is worth a lot less to them than their link to you.</p>

Your page is now formatted like this

So by using the <title> and </title> tag you can put a title on your page. You can have a heading by putting it between an <h1> and </h1> tag. And you can seperate your text between <p> and </p> tags.