HomeSite has one of the neatest and most approachable interfaces of any HTML editor

Allaire’s HomeSite 3.0 can be downloaded as a shareware try-out from the company’s home site www.allaire.com and has a 30 day licence, after which a $79 registration fee is called for. To begin with, the program is one of the easiest editors to approach, as it hides many of the daunting banks of icons on screens that are accessed through file tabs above the main window on the right hand side. The other main window, on the left, is used to navigate around your hard drive and the pages that have already been created.

Using a combination of templates and ‘wizards’ that will automatically create items like tables, forms and so on, HomeSite makes it relatively easy to build pages. These can quickly be previewed in your default Web browser, and changes made in the editor’s main screen. This involves cutting and pasting on actual Web pages as they are viewed, so you won’t need to be an HTML master to make small changes.

For those with a desire to learn at least some of the Web relatively simple scripting language, the program has an excellent help section with a huge amount of reference material on everything from the absolute basics to complex Dynamic HTML.

These excellent wizards will create stunning Dynamic HTML effects, but only for Explorer 4.0

The other main contender is Microsoft’s FrontPage 98, available as a download www.microsoft.com and carrying a registration fee of £69. Similar in many respects to HomeSite, FrontPage has a reasonably clean and clutter-free interface, and some superb features.

One of the best, and one you’ll find handy when creating a larger Web site, is the site management screen, which displays your pages in a tree format. This makes it easy both to check the way your site is structured, and click-drag pages from one part of the site to another. A bonus is that when you do this, FrontPage will actually create a navigation bar for your site, the look and feel of which will be in tune with whatever graphical theme you have chosen.

Supplied with 50 such themes, including buttons, ruler bars and other essential page furniture, FrontPage is probably the best package for those who want to create a site in minutes without worrying about graphics. So long as you don’t mind using the same buttons as many other Web sites, you can generate pages very quickly from the theme sets.

Some of the program’s limitations are apparent when you realise that a lot of the wizards are designed to produce Dynamic HTML effects that only work on Explorer 4.0 and above, and that its real power features depend on server extensions which only work on Windows NT Web servers. Apart from these drawbacks, FrontPage can hardly be faulted and is a great tool for the Web master who wants to steer clear of HTML.

Uploading your page

The FTP software is easy to set up and start to use

Getting pages from your desktop machine to the free Web space that U-NET provides is the next stage in setting up your site, and the software that you require is provided on the U-NET CD-Rom you received when you signed up. It’s called WS FTP, a ‘File Transfer Protocol’ program, and it is used to connect with the Web server and send it your pages.

Find WS FTP on your PC, and start it up. The first thing you’ll see is a ‘Session Properties’ window, into which you have to enter a few details so that the connection can take place. First off, the ‘Profile Name’ entry should read ‘Personal Web Space’, which is available from the drop-down menu if it isn’t already set up for this function. When you select this profile, the next box down should automatically be filled out with your Web site’s address, which is in the form ‘www.yourhostname.u-net.com’. Type this information into the box if it has not automatically been done for you.

The next box should be set to ‘Automatic detect’ so that the program will automatically figure out which kind of server it is connecting to and say hello in the correct fashion. If it is not set for ‘Automatic detect’, just choose that setting from the drop-down menu. Finally, you have two boxes for User ID and Password. The User ID box should already have your U-NET hostname in it, but you can type that in now if it doesn’t appear, and the Password box is where you type the logon password you normally use for connecting to U-NET.

To save you having to enter your password every time you upload pages to your Web site, just click on the ‘Save password’ checkbox to the left. You are now ready to upload, and should ignore the other text entry boxes in the session properties window. If you are not already connected to U-NET, leave this window open until you are online, then click on OK.

After a few seconds, you should see some information flashing past in the small text box at the bottom of the WS FTP screen. This lets you see what the server and your FTP package are saying to each other, and it’s where error messages will pop up if something goes wrong, such as in the unlikely event that so many people are logged onto the Web server that you can’t get in.

When the connection with the Web server is established, you should see a list of your hard drive’s contents on the left, and a list of your Web site’s contents on the right. The latter will, of course, be empty unless you have uploaded pages in the past. To upload a page to the server, first click on the ‘Auto’ checkbox at the bottom of the list screens. This tells the FTP program to automatically decide whether a file should be uploaded as an Ascii text file (for Web pages) or a binary file (for graphics and program files). Ticking the Auto box saves you having to remember to change this setting from time to time, and can help avoid errors, such as when an image is uploaded as if it were a text file full of digits rather than a binary file.

Now simply find the file you wish to upload using the window on the left, highlight it, then click on the right-pointing arrow between the two list windows. You’ll see a bit more information pop up in the text window at the bottom, such as the speed of the transfer, and the right hand window will update to show that your page has been uploaded.

You should always upload your home page first, and it should usually be called ‘home.htm’, as this is the name that our Web servers are told to look for as the first page of any Web site. If you do this, you should be able to point your Web browser at ‘www.yourhostname.u-net.com’ and your page will be displayed. Congratulations! You are now a Web site publisher.