This page is a small thank you to the people who have helped me in some way or another.

Also it will show you what programs I have used over the last 18 months and my personal opinion.

Right where to start.

Of course, the beginning.

Hot Dog! No I am not offering you a free lunch, this is a program that is ideal for the novice. I got hold of a trial version of this and it taught me the basic fundamentals of HTML. It was great as all you had to do was press an icon and the tag was automatically inserted for you. I can't honestly remember if I had any problems with it, but I am sure if there was any problems, they would have sorted them out by now. When the Hot Dog trial ran out, I was left with a choice. To register or try and make it on my own. My choice was the latter. Hot Dog had already taught me what tags were, and how they functioned. All I had to do was to buy a book to use for reference and also to teach me the workings of some tags which you do actually need to know if you are going to go it on your own

Which then brings me to the book I bought. Teach yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a week. The author of the book is called Laura Lemay and she is such a great teacher! She made the book very understandable and I have her to thank for a lot of my knowledge. The book is published by Sams Net. The program I used was Windows Note Pad.

I used to lean on friends too. Late night and early morning phone calls to Colin and Dave was the norm for me at this stage. But they were great helps. Thanks boys!

Ok so my page needed a drastic overhaul. To me it had started to look really boring and obviously I had a bit more that I wanted to write. The problem was trying to find the motivation to get started again. One thing about using Note Pad is that you have to write your own tags and it gets quite tedious. So I then tried Netscape Composer. This is within Netscape Navigator 4. This is another excellent user friendly program and with the obvious advantage, it was free! I had one problem with this and that was I could not find any Frames functions. This to me was important as I wanted to use frames within my page, but no matter how well Laura Lemay explained it, it was a function that I just could not get my head around!

So I got Microsoft Front Page. This again is a FANTASTIC program. It has pre-set themes which you can chose from to illustrate your site in a consistent fashion. It has a frames function (phew) and just about anything else you could possible want. The one down side to me is that it has to put an image in telling everyone that you have used their software, which is fine to the degree that they can show off what their software can do on your page, but also it gets on my nerves the way they use every possible way to advertise. If you pay for a package, you should get a discount if you are also going to advertise their product. That is my way of thinking anyway.

Well all I can say now is that I have tried 3 software packages, and I am again reduced to using Note Pad again as I found both Netscape and Front Page a tad messy within the page source which is something that I cannot abide.

I hope that this page has helped someone to make a decision as to what method they will use, but two pieces of advice that I will give is... buy a book so that not only can you write your own pages, but also learn to understand what each function is about. And the second is.... this is your page, your moment, remember NOT to overdo graphics 'cos some people still have SLOW modems and cannot be bothered to wait around for a graphic to load, but that does not mean that you cannot express your creative side. Give it all you have and do it in your OWN style :o)

GOOD LUCK!!!