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Millions of web pages exist that contain useful information about making your own web pages. That huge volume of information can be daunting when you are just getting started, so I present here a list of topics that you may wish to consider as you get started. Each topic has one or more on-line references that I have found useful.
Terminology & Glossaries
If you are relatively new to the web, it will be helpful to know something about the terminology or jargon, especially the acronyms. If you know folks who use the web heavily, maybe you've heard sentences like "... and so I keyed in this URL and the CGI script asked me for my domain name and whether I was using a T-1 or a 28.8K modem, but the only thing I knew was the IP number of my ISP..." (!?!)
The ILC Glossary of Internet Terms by Internet Literacy Consultants is a must-read (takes only about 10 minutes or so) if you want to get up to speed on the "lingo." A nice list of web-oriented glossaries is available as part of The Webmaster's Reference Library -- a comprehensive site that has great information for novices as well as experts.
“How do they do that?”
You’ve probably seen a nifty web page of some sort and wondered how you could do it, too. The web is incredibly self-documented, and the usual search tools do an excellent job of digging up useful tips and examples. PHOAKS (People Helping One Another Know Stuff) is a search tool that uses collaborative filting (i.e., people’s opinions about resources are factored in) to produce search results that focus on good resources.
HTML Code
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the underlying code behind the web pages (in Netscape Navigator you can see this code for any web page you are looking at by selecting "View -> Page Source"). HTML is strictly ASCII (i.e., human-readable), and consists of text and formatting tags to control the appearance of the text. Other HTML tags are used to create hyperlinks (that's how you jump from one web page to the next) and to display images.
A Beginner’s Guide to HTML is the premier guide to getting started with HTML. Additional HTML guides are listed here. Even if you use a web page authoring tool such as Netscape Composer and never write HTML code directly, you will be able to do a much better job with your authoring tool if you understand the capabilities and the limitations of HTML.
Authoring Tools
While it is possible to construct good web sites using only a text editor, it's not much fun -- kind of like writing PostScript printer files from scratch rather than using a word processor. Netscape Composer (bundled with Netscape Communicator) let's you compose web pages using a wordprocessor-like environment (it's the method I used to make this web page).
If you use Microsoft Word, you will want to consider Internet Assistant for Word, which can produce HTML versions of your favorite Word documents. This is an excellent technique for translating wordprocessor files into HTML format, since Word can read a variety of other formats such as WordPerfect.
You can put your PowerPoint presentations on the web, too: check out Internet Assistant for PowerPoint.
Style Manuals
The Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide is an excellent resource for helping you to design a quality web site.
Icons & Clip Art
There are probably billions of little clip-art images and icons out there, most of them free, which you can use to add interest to your pages. I recently looked at this typical site and discovered a pointer to the Clip Art Connection -- it's a great place to get started!
Animated GIF Images
You’ve probably noticed the little images that animate themselves... here's one now:
