Make your own free webpage

Follow the steps below and you will have your website live and online in no time!

Step 1: Sign Up
Go to the Semibase FreeSite sign up (*) page to set up your free website hosting account, the form will only take a minute to complete. We value your privacy and all information you provide will be kept strictly confidential and not given to third parties.

Step 2: Login
After you sign up you will be sent an email with your login and password information. Use this information to login to your FreeSite control panel for creating and editing your own website.

Step 3: Click on "View Site"
This will open up a new browser so that you can view the default page 'index.html'. This is the first page that people will see when they access your website. As you can see this is an example page created with our own graphics and text. In the next steps you will be changing this page to fit your own company's information.

Step 4: Control Panel
If you are still viewing the 'index.html' page, please close this browser window and go back to your FreeSite control panel. In the members homepage you can view your website files, edit your personal details and access other features. Now click on "Edit Site" which will take you to the File Manager page where your web pages reside.

Step 5: File Manager
This is the section where you can create, edit, and update all of your website pages and graphic images. For the first part of the exercise using the file manager lets upload your company's image logo.

Step 6: Uploading Images
When you viewed the example index.html page you probably noticed the Semibase logo at the top of the page. The Semibase graphics logo is located within the "images" folder of your file manager.

Click on the "images" text link next to the folder icon or click on open. The next page will display the content of this folder and show an image called "yourcompanylogo.gif". "yourcompanylogo.gif" is the actual Semibase logo image.

We will add your own company logo image. To do this you will upload your image through the form provided below the page called "Upload a File" and a "Browse" button next to it. Click the browse button and it will pop open a window that will let you look through files in your own computer.

Find your logo image file on your computer, select it and click "Open" (if you don't have your logo on your computer either create one or save it to your computer). This should place a text string into the input box next to the "Browse" button. (note: the file type of any images on FreeSite pages must be in the .gif, .jpg, .bmp, .html, .htm format)

Click on the "Upload File" button and your file will now be uploaded through the internet to the images folder with a message confirming this. Now, go back to the File Manager and click on the refresh button of the browser and you will see your image file added next to the "yourcompanylogo.gif" file.

Step 7: Editing HTML Files (your homepage)
Now you need to edit your homepage file, called index.html, so it correctly points to your new company's logo file. To do this return to the File Manager and click on the "edit" link next to the "index.html" file.

This will open up a page with a large input box showing the html code for this specific index.html page.

Don't worry about what all the tags mean for now. For the purpose of this exercise we will modify the index.html page so that all your company information will show up on this page. The page has been split up with comment tags that indicate what areas need to be edited by you. It's really easy!

Begin looking through the HTML code and you will see multiple lines of text that look some thing like this:
<!--------------(Step 1) ---------- >
and
<!-------------- End of Step 1 ---------- >

Every time you see these comment lines with a step in them it means you need to edit whatever is between the "(Step 1)" and "End of Step 1" lines. Each comment also has a short explanation of what needs to be changed.

Step 8: The first step in editing index.html
As you can see the first comment tag says:
"<!----- (Step 1)Edit "YOUR COMPANY NAME" below to your own company's name. --------->"
Let's modify this. Below the comment tag you will find the text "YOUR COMPANY NAME" within the <title> </title> tags. If your company's name is "Dave's Company" you would replace the "YOUR COMPANY NAME" text with "Dave's Company".

Step 9: The second step in editing index.html
The second step to edit the index.html file (indicated by the Step 2 comment tag) tells you to replace "YOURCOMPANYLOGO.gif" with the name of the image file we uploaded earlier. So, if the logo you uploaded earlier was named "DavesLogo.gif" you should replace "YOURCOMPANYLOGO.gif" with "DavesLogo.gif".

You should now be in a position to go through all of the comment tags until you have changed the index.html file to reflect your company's details.

For the product images ie.product1.jpg (steps 6 to 10) you will need to upload your own product files to replace the "Product 1" images that you can see on this page. You can do this in the same way you uploaded your own business logo.

Step 10: Submitting your file
After you have edited this file to include all of your information, click on the "submit" button at the bottom of the page to save this file.

Step 11: Viewing your finished webpage
If you have completed the above steps correctly you should have your first website! To get to your website type the following address into your web browser: http://freesites.semibase.com/YOURSITENAME

Change "YOURSITENAME" to the name you used to login to the FreeSite control panel. For example, if you logged in with the sitename "DavesCompany" your web address would be:
http://freesites.semibase.com/DavesCompany

You can now tell anyone in the world your web address and they will be able to view it over the internet.

Step 12: Adding more html
The format provided in the index.html page is to show you how easy it is to create a web page. However, once you become more familiar with the use of the html tags, you can design this page anyway you wish to suit your taste! Just go into File Manager and edit the file and add your own html tags and images including other html files.

More Resources
If you want to learn more about HTML and how to improve your website with HTML codes here is a list of some good HTML resources:

Webmonkey - HTML Basics and HTML Cheatsheet
Builder.com - HTML Basics and how to use common HTML tags.