In all seriousness, this site includes over seventy smaller pages, all of them coded only in HTML, without any kind of web editor. I taught myself, using sources from other websites as my guide.

The first thing you need in order to build a website is some kind of server. I am using Tripod, because it's free. Once you have a server, you can begin to upload images and files.

Say you want to build a pretty website (unlike mine, for example). You will have to imagine the entire website visually. That's why it's called "web design." Once you have a pretty good idea of what you want to do, you will either have to find .gifs and .jpgs that correspond to that idea, or you will have to draw them, scan them, and upload them to the server yourself. That's how people get those pretty side bars and borders-- they are all smaller .gifs uploaded to their server. I chose not to do that, because I am extremely lazy.

HTML is fairly simple, and there are good tutorial sites out there on the subject. Tripod has one (Webmonkey), and other sites feature code as well. I won't go into it, except to give you a couple of HTML tags that I had a helluva time finding, even though they aren't that difficult to use.

Put <> where I have brackets. You can position the text within the TD using the "px" command. You have to tell the text "I want you to be two hundred pixels from the bottom, and fifty pixels from the left side." You can also tell it how far it should be from the top or the right. I use bottom and left because it doesn't give me a headache.

Another tag I had a hard time finding was the "span" tag. The code looks like this:

Again, put <> where I have brackets. You choose the background color. This puts a different colored background behind your text, like a highlight. It's useful in conjunction with the DIV command.

One of the problems with my site is that I chose to use constrained tables. Ordinarily, the start of an HTML document is the [table] command. I use [table width=900], which tells the table to extend 900 pixels across the page, and no farther. If you don't define width, the table will take up the whole browser. I did this so that I would know how my graphics would juggle on different screens-- and also so that resizing the browser window didn't create a helluva mess. If you choose to define your table width, you must remember to use it with each table row and each new table on the page.

I'll come back to this page and add more, particularly about tables-within-tables (which are a pain in the ass), but it's 6 AM and this needs to be done by 9, so guess what I'm doing?