GeoCities provides a free web site for your web page and it is fine if you don't mind having a small amount of advertisement on your page. To register go to http://geocities.yahoo.com and click on "Sign up for a free web site". Be sure and write down your user name and password because you will need it whenever you want to make a change to your web page. When you sign up it will ask you to provide an alternate e-mail address. You can put down your own e-mail address there Your username will be the extention for your web page name.

After you have signed on with your user name and password it will show you a screen with two options for building your web page - PageWizard or PageBuilder. For a simple personal web page PageWizard is fine although it is very limited with what you can do. It offers you some pretty backgrounds but the space for text is limited and the picture size is very small. You can however open that simple page into PageBuilder and edit it.

PageBuilder is much better for designing a genealogy web page. Here you can insert text boxes or pictures anywhere you want them. It is a full featured web page editor which allows you to change fonts and font sizes. You can resize the text boxes by clicking and dragging the corner of the text box. You can import pictures and resize them by clicking and dragging the corner of the picture. It also allows you to import a background of your choice. Check out Helen's Background Images at: http://members.designheaven.com/~helentr/picture_index.htm

The biggest problem with the free GeoCities pages is that you cannot download the files that you have created with the GeoCities tools - for instance if you want to put them on your internet service provider's free web space without advertisements. You can however upload a web page's "index.htm" file that you have created offline. I have found this will not work if you use the ".html" extention - use ".htm" instead. This index file contains all instructions for the constuction of the page and is the heart of the web page. You must also upload any pictures and any subfiles or background files that are mentioned in the index file. Use the .html extention on any other html files that you upload. For an example of a page that was uploaded see: http://www.geocities.com/herba2003/. To view the web page that was created in class see: http://www.geocities.com/herba2005/.

GeoCities has provided a File Manager which works very well for uploading your files. It has a browse feature which will let you find the file that you want to upload on your computer. You can use it to edit the .html files also. You cannot use FTP for uploading or downloading files in a GeoCities free site. To do that you must sign up for one of their premium sites which are not free.

If you have any problems constructing your web page send me an e-mail at hvabrams@cox.net and I will try to resolve them.

Herb Abrams - SOCCGS Webmaster and Publicity Chairman

soccgs@savoury.net