Want to have your Web site sport a Web domain name like "www.myname.com" without ponying up the bucks for it? No, NetNames doesn't charge a great deal to register your domain name, but a special Web site hosting account will cost you. Instead, try a URL redirection site. There are two ways to do it. MyDomain (www.mydomain.com/), NameDemo (www.namedemo.com/), NameZero (www.namezero.com/), and NameSecure (www.namesecure.com/), like the other registration sites above, will register your domain name for you through InterNic; these services charge a modest fee, but you're official. Other redirection services like the free CJBNet Internet Services (www.cjb.net/), Freeservers (www.freeservers.com/) and WebAlias (www.webalias.com/) simply give you a permanent subdirectory on their server without registering you. (CJBNet names your site www.yoursite.cjb.net/, while Freeservers and WebAlias have a number of domain names to choose from, giving you such options as www.yoursite.iwarp.com/ or www.yoursite.browser.to.com/. Either way, surfers who link or type that URL connect with the URL redirect service, who sends them to your real site at whatever its URL really is. They even redirect e-mail. Not a bad idea, but with the recent price drop in domain registration, this alternative seems to be fading out.

An Internet trading center for commercial (.com) Net addresses is at .com Exchange at www.websitenames.com/. The data banks contain over 800 available .com domain names searchable by category.

Want to find out who owns a domain name? Perform a whois search at www.netsol.com/ or www.internic.net/whois.html to find a site owner and their registrar. This is public information, and useful for determing a site's legitimacy. The Internic site seems to prefer that you leave off the "www." when entering a site name.

To have an effective Web site, you need one that's available 24/7, no arguments, glitches, or frequent downtime. But why waste your time checking on your site when there's a free alternative? NetWhistle (www.netwhistle.com/) pings your site at stated intervals, checks e-mail boxes, and reports back to you via e-mail or pager. It sends an immediate message if it finds a problem; otherwise, it reports to you at weekly intervals. Link-Spy (www.link-spy.com/) does the same thing, on a weekly or even daily basis.

Experienced Webcrafters know that to have a truly effective Web site, you need to build a site that works in all the major browsers. Check your site over at anybrowser.com/. This site has recently expanded and now offers all kinds of site validation and improvement tools, many of which are free.

The kind folks at Florida Designs (www.floridadesigns.com/) have provided us with a useful "Web Design Internet Glossary" of terms commonly used in Web design. Check it out at www.floridadesigns.com/web_design_glossary.htm.

Find out what browsers support what protocols -- JavaScript, DHTML, frames, what have you -- at this Webmonkey site: hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/browser_chart/. Links to Mac, Unix/Linux, and other browsers are available.

Validate your code with the latest HTML 4.1 standards by visiting validator.w3.org/. Other good places to check your site for problems are Netscape's WebSite Garage at www.websitegarage.com, Web Design Group's code checker at www.htmlhelp.com, NetMechanic at www.netmechanic.com, A List Apart at www.alistapart.com/index.html, and the free plug-in from HTML Tidy at tidy.sourcefourge.net.

Find out if your site's links work by visiting Xenu's Link Sleuth at home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html and downloading the free program. Warning: Xenu, as well as other, more expensive link checker programs, often have problems validating links to Amazon.com.

Among the plethora of Webmaster help sites out there are Microsoft's rather busy BCentral (www.bcentral.com/) and MyComputer (www.mycomputer.com/), which offers plenty of freebies as well as fee-based services. A new entrant on the free Web services market is Moonfruit (www.moonfruit.com/), which uses lots of Flash-based techniques to help you build a, uh, flashy site. These two are perennial faves for Web designers: EarthWebDeveloper, at www.webdeveloper.earthweb.com/, and WebReview, at www.webreview.com/. And Web Techniques (www.webtechniques.com/) and the Web Tools section of Software QA and Testing (www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.htm) are excellent places to go for tutorials, articles, resources, and testing tools.

It's not hard to build your own Web site, whether or not you know anything about HTML or Web site creation. If you really want to dive in, you can try-and-buy sophisticated programs such as Allaire's HomeSite ($99 and a truly excellent program), Adobe's PageMill ($99), or Microsoft's bloatcode special, FrontPage 2000 ($150), or you can just lay out the bucks for big-ticket programs like NetObjects' Fusion ($300) or Macromedia's excellent Dreamweaver MX ($300+). You can also use the built-in features of free programs such as Netscape's Composer, MSIE's FrontPage Express, or Microsoft's Word 97 Web creation feature to create Web sites, but they can be a bit limited and have a tendency to create bloated, unwieldy code (especially FrontPage -- ecch). Want to make a basic Web site without spending any money? Several Web authoring programs are available for free. America Online, believe it or not, used to offer a highly respected freebie called AOLPress. AOL doesn't offer it anymore, but you can still get Version 2.0 from members.aol.com/rjdriver/aolpress.htm, among other places. HotDog (www.sausagetools.com/products/index.html) is excellent. The demo is free (and quite usable), but you need to know some basic HTML before this program will be of use. You can choose to keep HotDog for $30, but you can later upgrade to HotDog Pro at a discount. There's also HotDog's PageWiz for complete novices. Another basic but flexible HTML editor that works well for the slightly initiate is the free Arachnophilia (www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/). A much more powerful HTML coder and editor is xSite, available free from xsite.lad.co.za/ (the site is down as I write this, but you can find it among the shareware sites -- my listing is here). If you just want to create a no-frills Web site without a lot of bells and whistles, consider Web Wizard from www.the-webwizard.co.uk/. It's free for the download, and an excellent Web authoring tool for the novice. The Ant is a neat, rather complicated set of tools that converts MSWord files to HTML files, and HTML files to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) graphical previews for easy Web site creation. The program's been discontinued (find out why at telacommunications.com.ant/), but again, it's available online. Another easy-to-use text editor, TextPad, is a $27 shareware program from www.textpad.com/ that easily edits plain text into HTML form, even doing special coding formatting. MS Office users can use MS Word as their Web maker by downloading the free Word 97 Web Authoring Tools Update from officeupdate.microsoft.com/. WebScripter 3.0, from www.codegeneration.com/, is a full-featured Web site builder that lets you create JavaScripts without the need for programming knowledge. Other HTML editors are always being added in the HTML Shareware and Freeware section of this site. Need a source for basic HTML terminology? Try The Bare Bones Guide to HTML at werbach.com/barebones/ for definitions and info. Pick up some free tutoring at Introduction to HTML (www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/) or, for the more savvy user, NCSA's Beginner's Guide (archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/).

Add a search engine to your site to make life easier on your visitors. (This site will feature one soon.) Atomz Express, at www.atomz.com/, is one of the best and easiest to implement, and free to boot for sites under 500 pages. FreeFind, at www.freefind.com/, may be a better choice for really large sites, but isn't as capable of a search engine, and installing it may be a hassle. Another good choice, SiteLevel, can be found at sitelevel.whatuseek.com/services-basic.shtml. Or just have your visitors download the Google toolbar for your browser and use its "Search Site" function to search your site. That's what I'm currently recommending.

Want to spice up your Web page with Java applets, but have no idea how to create one? Check first at Java's parents' place, Sun's JavaSoft division (www.javasoft.com). Then check out the freebies at Gamelan: The Java Directory at java.developer.com. Also good bets are the sites at JARS (jars.com) and the Java Boutique (javaboutique.internet.com), which features a large selection of simple applets that even a novice can add to his Web page without making his head explode. And for easy Java applet construction, try the freeware Applet Menu Wizard, available from members.tripod.com/~SourceTec/menuwizard.html. JavaScripts of all kinds can be had for the downloading from javascript.internet.com/; the snazzy search feature in these pages came from there. My Free Toolbox at www.myfreetoolbox.com/ also features lots of free JavaScript code snippets, many of which can be customized for your own use. More JavaScripts snippets can be found at www.24fun.com/ as well as Webmonkey's hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/
reference/javascript_code_library and Dynamic Drive, at www.dynamicdrive.com/, which features DHTML and Perl code snippets as well as JavaScript. More code scripts and such can be had at www.scriptsearch.com/.

All kinds of general HTML/Web site nifties can be had at reallybig.com/default.shtml, a warehouse for wallpapers, code snippets, fonts, graphics, hosts, what have you. Another source is www.thefreecountry.com/; boogiejack.com is one I like.

Want to have a fill-in form on your Web site? The hard way is to mount a CGI script and negotiate with your ISP to host it; the easy way is to visit FormSite at www.formsite.com/. These kind folks provide you with up to 5 forms and 30 items for free, and charge a reasonable fee for additional forms. How do they keep their costs down? By displaying ads on your freebies. If you're twitchy about writing the HTML code for your forms, they offer templates, but they're rather generic. Another provider, QuickBase (www.quickbase.com/), offers free and paid database (API) services for your Web site. Other free and cheaper resources are catalogued at cgi.resourceindex.com/Remotely_Hosted/. Other CGI resources can be found at, among many others, www.cgi-resources.com/.

Looking for a new GUI or template for your site? Check out www.guistuff.com/ for downloadable templates or an easy way to generate something (relatively) original. There are plenty of other sources for templates and themes, many of which are associated with Microsoft's Front Page. Try one of these URLs for a new look for your site: freethemes.hypermart.net/, www.pixelmill.net/, themesets.net/, www.frontpageworld.com/, www.freelayouts.com/, www.shalltech.com/, the free Dreamweaver-based sample templates from www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates, and for a more simple set of designs, www.nutnbolt.co.uk/. Most of these sites offer at least some, if not all, their wares free for the download.

If your site needs map content, one of the best choices is MapBlast! (www.mapblast.com/). Creating your own map isn't the easiest thing you'll ever do, but the site walks you through the process with a minimum of fuss, and once you're done, you can paste the site-generated HTML into your pages with relative ease. MapQuest, at www.mapquest.com/, offers a similar service, but isn't nearly as user-friendly. Both provide basic services for free, with more sophisticated, interactive content provided for a fee.

You can also add message boards and chat capabilities for your site if you like. Multicity (www.multicity.com/) provides freebies for both, although their look isn't as sophisticated as a corporate site designer may like; an alternative, Feedback Chat, can be pored over at www.feedbackchat.com/. Firetalk, at www.firetalk.com/, offers voice-based chat, though the sound quality is reportedly low.

Spice up your site with some syndicated content -- cartoons, jokes, news tickers, tips, games, what have you, most of which is refreshed every day. Some sources for syndicated content are below:

• 4FreeContent: 4freecontent.com/

• Artigen News Ticker: www.artigen.com/newswire/ticker.html

• Bravenet Network: www.bravenet.com/

• CartoonLink Network: www.cartoonlink.net/

• CoolPick: coolios.com/way/cool/syn/intro.html

• Crossword Buddy: www.loquax.co.uk/puzzles/

• Dayinvestor Stock Ticker: www.dayinvestor.com/siteticker/index.html

• HomePage Tools: www.homepagetools.com/

• iSyndicate: www.isyndicate.com/

• L.A. Times: www.timeslink.com/

• Mamma: www.mamma.com/acb/

• MapBlast: www.mapblast.com/mblast/mpubinfo.mb

• MapQuest: www.mapquest.com/cgi-bin/stat_parser?link=online-services

• Moreover: www.moreover.com/ (a Moreover news feed is on the home page of this site)

• News Harvester: www.webreference.com/headlines/nh/

• NewsClicker: www.newsclicker.com/

• NewsEdge: www.newsedge.com/

• Stockpoint: www.stockpoint.com/register.asp

• Survey Engine: mail.infotrieve.com/

• Uproar (a game): www.uproar.com/webdevelopers/

• Vibrant Media (lots of news feeds): www.vibrantmedia.com/

• Weather Underground: www.wunderground.com/about/faq/weathersticker.asp

• Web Site Tools: www.web-site-tools.com/

The gnomes at About.com also keep a list of free providers at html.about.com/cs/freecontent/.

Get tips and suggestions for good site keywords at goodkeywords.com/.

Add interactive quizzes to your site with a $30 program called Qwizzed, available from www.ntmusa.com/. You can create a quiz, configure its appearance, and link it to your site. All quizzes are hosted on www.quizzed.com, and stats of how many times your quiz was accessed, etc. are available online.

You can add voice chat to your Web site quickly and easily by adding the free Hear Me utility to your site. Check it out from www.hearme.com/. ICQ users can download Hear Me for ICQ from the same site.

Want to create free interactive polls for your visitors? Try the offerings at www.evite.com/, www.votations.com/ and www.createapoll.com/. All are free and have multiple formatting options. Other options include www.pollit.com/, globalguestpoll.com/, www.go2poll.com/, and www.mypoll.net/.

• AOL Hometown. 12MB free Web space provided for AOL and non-AOL members, ad banners on every page. Hometown AOL seems a bit antiseptically "suburban" in its layout, with row after row of basic home pages built from the same set of components. However, while many members do little more than assemble simple personal pages from the basics, plenty of resources exist for more ambitious Web construction, giving more flexibility than either Angelfire or Xoom, but not as much as Homestead or GeoCities. Users can design pages quickly and easily through AOL's 1-2-3 Publish, using basic templates and easily manipulated elements such as bulleted lists, links, images, and text. Users are also able to delve into a wealth of tutorials, online classes, shareware, and other goodies to help the novice learn his or her trade; they can also upload their own pages from outside the system. However, features such as counters, guestbooks, frames, forms, etc. are not supported unless you can write your own HTML. Go to AOL Keyword: Hometown or to hometown.aol.com/. They're now offering "Easy Designer," available at that keyword or at hometown.aol.com/ed, that walks you through an easy, template-based creation of a home page. An AOL account is not required, though you have to sign up with Hometown AOL (and install AOL Instant Messenger) to get a site.

• eCircles. Defunct as of April 2001.

• Echo Hosting. Defunct as of Echoweb's acquisition by SitePoint in early 2001. Find out more from www.sitepoint.com/echoweb/.

• Fortune City. These guys offer 25MB of free Web space, the freedom to post your own HTML as well as offering the use of a site-building software package for the HTML-illiterate, a free e-mail address, and the only ad they seem to require is a single banner. They also offer their site in almost a dozen languages. They've had problems in the past with crashes and forced reloads, but they look to be positioning themselves as a major player in the field. Look them over at www.fortunecity.com/. Recently the site has revamped itself; it looks a lot cheesier, with ad content crowding out the usable stuff.

• FreeYellow. A veteran of the free Web site competition, FreeYellow doesn't get the publicity that some of the others get, but now that they're part of the Go2Net community, that may change. They offer 50MB of Web space, a "Web wizard" that helps you build your site, free e-mail and counters, free access to both personal and corporate users, and easy FTPing. They claim to refrain from peppering your site with ads, restricting themselves to a single banner on your pages. How their offerings compare to the leaders in the field, Geocities and Homestead, I'm not sure, but you can always find out for yourself at www.freeyellow.com/. FreeYellow is no longer free, but they do offer a 60-day free trial period.

• HomePages. The free hosting service is defunct; Homepages is now part of Verio, and is simply a Web hosting service now.

• Homestead. No longer offering free site space, Homestead offers 25MB Web space with no ads, and they require only a small link to Homestead at the bottom of each page. Homestead has a site-building utility easily the equal of GeoBuilder available for its members, with a slight advantage in variety of functions (chat rooms and visitor polls, even). Like Angelfire, Homestead has a plethora of graphics available to spice your site; unlike Angelfire or most of the others, Homestead has numerous tools to help give your Web site some variety and oomph. The only drawback is that users who want to upload their own pages often run into snags (reformatted HTML, FTP glitches, etc.). Homestead has revamped itself to appeal more to the small business user than the personal sitebuilder, so if the corporate-friendly atmosphere is to your liking, see what you think at www.homestead.com/.

• Lycos Angelfire. Gives you 20MB of Web space for free, rife with pop-up ads and banners. Not too difficult for the beginner to build his own Web site, but the editor is bare-bones, help is sparse, and the forms sometimes confusing. A basic knowledge of HTML will really help Angelfire users. You're somewhat restricted as to what your site will look like, unlike the relative freedom given users of Geocities and Homestead, even if you use the advanced site editor, and the URL is complicated. An advantage is the large number of graphics files available for members to spruce up their pages. Now that Lycos has acquired both Tripod and Angelfire, both services are offering similar features and addons, including blogs. Check them out at www.angelfire.lycos.com/.

• Lycos Tripod. 50MB free Web space, pop-up ads abound. Premium Web space available -- 22MB, e-mail forwarding (username@tripod.net) for $18/month, no ads for an additional $3/month. Novices can use the Tripod Site Builder to make their template-based sites; more experienced users will want to try Tripod's version of TrellixWeb or, for the HTML-knowledgeable, their "Freeform" editor. Trellix users will want to turn off the HTML Frames option, otherwise their pages will be strewn with banner ads. Everyone gets stuck with big pop-up ads. Tripod does support FrontPage extensions as well as allows FTP transfer of files -- good for those of us who create our own site codes. Check it out at www.tripod.lycos.com/.

• NetColony. Not as well known as the others, but they offer 100MB of free Web space, unlimited bandwidth, your own message board, a Web page creator, templates, a guestbook, and more. Banners at the top of the page seem to be the order of the day. Very friendly to promotional and commercial sites. Find out more at www.netcolony.com/.

• Nettaxi no longer provides free Web hosting services; see www.nettaxi.com/ for more info.

• Spaceports provides "unlimited" free Web space (20MB to start with) as well as additions like CGI and MySQL access. The site requires either banner ads or popups to be displayed on all pages. Scope it out at www.spaceports.com/.

• TheGlobe.com. TheGlobe shut down its free Web provider services in August 2001, but it does continue to maintain its gaming sites; find out more at www.theglobe.com/.

• XOOM. Xoom was one of the great early free Web hosts, but it is now defunct.

• Yahoo! GeoCities. 15MB free Web space, plenty of pop-up ads and/or a GeoCities "watermark" on every page; premium space (25MB and no ads) available for $5/month; business sites available; all sites organized into "neighborhoods" of similarly-themed pages. GeoCities gives the novice home page builder Yahoo PageBuilder, an excellent WSYIWYG utility that assists the most hapless Webmaster in building a functional, attractive Web site. Some graphics are available for the Web builder, though not as many as with Homestead or Angelfire. But the damn watermark and pop-up ads that appear in new browser windows can drive any surfer insane (you can become a paying member of GeoPlus and not only lose the watermark, but get up to 25MB of space, and gain access to sophisticated Web design tools such as CGI scripts, Java applets, counters, and visitor stats; the pop-ups can be disabled by placing a banner called a GeoGuide at the top of every page). Geocities is strictly noncommercial. A big drawing point is a site's automatic listing in the Yahoo! directory, thus cranking up traffic. Look them over at geocities.yahoo.com/home/ Note of interest: Geocities residents and users organized a boycott when Yahoo! bought Geocities and on June 28th, 1999, informed the residents that all the Web content displayed on Geocities suddenly belonged to Yahoo! Naturally Geocities site builders were less than pleased, and protested volubly. Other site owners such as Tripod backed the protesters. The 8-day protest/boycott forced Yahoo! to rethink and restrict their claims of ownership. Upshot: Internet users were able to force their will on a big corporate conglomerate, in possibly the first major Internet-led boycott in history. Note that Chris the Lockergnome likes the Geocities site builder so much, he recommends building your site on Geocities using the program, then copying it to your own site host.

Warning: from my own experience with more than one of these free hosts, it is much tougher to transfer an existing site to their servers with a minimum of fuss, hassles, and extraneous, unwanted additions, than it is to create (or recreate) a site from scratch. It can also difficult to break out of their sometimes simplistic sitebuilder programs and do your own coding. Another problem is that some providers strip title and header information from the pages before posting, making it impossible to be listed with search engines. Ask before you post.

More sophisticated sites have user-interface forms that surfers can fill out; this can be as simple as asking for feedback, providing e-mail addresses for newsletters, or more sophisticated uses. Now us small fry can have some of those options without having to pay our ISPs extra for setting up CGI response protocols, etc. FreeCode (www.freecode.com/) provides free programs and scripts to give your site visitor response capability. DK3 Free Form Processing (www.formprocessing.dk3.com/) lets your site provide Web forms that are turned into e-mail that is sent to your account. HostedScripts, at www.hostedscripts.com/, offers free CGI scripts that allow you to add message boards, mailing lists, and password protections for registered access.

Speaking of password protecting your Web sites, you can create password-protected sites that only you and your buddies can access. About.com tells you how to do it through two separate services, Bravenet and PoppyDog, on this page: personalweb.about.com/cs/securityprivacy/a/312password.htm. It also gives you some tips on using your own JavaScript to protect your pages from the rest of the world. Good for storing photos, personal information, etc. that you don't want to share with every greasy surfer dude out there.

Want to set up a private Web forum amongst good chat buddies without the annoyance of intruders popping in with "Wanna cyber?" or "Anyone from San Antonio?" messages? Want to do it free? The gnomes at Delphi have opened their servers to the free creation of chat/message board forums, and better yet, they've made it ridiculously easy to do. Skate over to www.delphiforums.com/ for more info, including how-tos on making private forums. (Delphi allows free usage, but if you want a forum that has the bells and whistles, you'll need to buy Delphi Plus.) Another option is PowWow at www.tribal.com/, a $50 app that gives you a nice chunk of software along with access to PowWow's remote administration, for chat and messaging administration on remote servers. And a third option is Interactive Toasters' MemberSites, a free offering that gives you the option of joining their online community, at www.membersites.com/. Other online communities worth exploring are ActiveWorlds, a 3D chat forum at www.activeworlds.com/, WorldCrossing at www.worldcrossing.com/, eGroups at www.egroups.com/, ECircles at www.ecircles.com/, Excite Communities at www.excite.com/communities/directory/, DigitalSpace at digitalspace.com/avatars/, ForumSpace at www.forumspace.com/, Involv.net (more oriented for business-focused information dissemination) at www.involv.net/, 321 Website at www.321website.com/, and Yahoo! Clubs at clubs.yahoo.com/, probably the most comprehensive of the standard, general-interest Web communities out there. WorldCrossing lets you add free message boards/forums to your Web site; others may also. Go to www.forumone.com/index/ for a list of online communities. Nexus offers free site-based message boards along with other site components, free, from www.nexwebsites.com/. (Note: Delphi, and no doubt others, are going to a pay-to-host format, which might limit some of us with tight wallets.)

Warning: The dangers of Internet cyberstalking and hacking are very, very real and more dangerous than most people realize. Visit Cyberangels at www.cyberangels.org/ for more information, and if you're an Internet forum member, blogger, or chat maven, prepare to be shaken up.

You do know that you can sneak a peek at a site's source by right-clicking the site window and choosing View Source, right? MSIE even opens it up in Notepad for you, which makes it easy to crib someone else's code -- too easy, perhaps. However, there's no better way to learn the tricks of the trade than to see how someone else does their pages, even if you shouldn't lift their code. You can force a site's code to display in the browser window instead of the site itself by adding the phrase "view-source" (without the quotes) to the beginning of the URL: for example, view-source:http://www.fubar.com.

Not all of us are sick, twisted bastards. For those of us interested in keeping the kiddies (or ourselves) away from questionable sites, there are several options. This.com is a full-fledged ISP that uses server-based filters to keep users from accessing porn or hate sites -- the company claims to be able to make the subtle distinctions necessary to let users visit, say, art sites with nude paintings but not the skin sites. SurfMonkey.com is a kid-oriented Web portal that blocks access to questionable sites as well as denying chat access to strangers. They've slimmed it down from a tubby 14MB download using its own browser to a slim 250K browser plug-in that shows up as a bar at the bottom of your screen (available from www.surfmonkey.com/free_trial/MSDownloadBar.asp?MIE.) Currently SurfMonkey only works with MSIE 4 and above; it's expected to be available for Netscape and AOL by the time you read this. Another option is Crayon Crawler, a free browser from 1st Net that restricts surfers to a list of sites cleared by the company or the parent. No random surfing is allowed. Pony up $5 a month and get access to chat, IMs, and a talking bookreader. The Internet Safety Guide is available at www.getnetwise.org, and provides useful info about the risks associated with e-mail, chat, message boards, and other unsupervised communication.

The Web lives and breathes freebies; pick up lots of Web freebies like graphics files, Web counters, e-mail apps, and much, much more at The Free Site at www.thefreesite.com/. Another site full of free and almost-free stuff is Volition at www.volition.com/free.html, and another, Mike's World (www.mikesworld.net) focuses on goodies for Web designers. One of the better offerings from Mike's World is Mail Machine, a free script for handling mailing lists. Find out more at www.mikesworld.net/mailmachine.shtml. You should also take a look at www.freevault.com/.

One of the most appealing freebies out there is at Flaming Text (www.flamingtext.com), which creates GIF or JPG text logos for you online with any of a number of special effects: flaming letters, chrome, drop shadows, etc. All you have to do is make your choices, have them process it (very quick turnaround, I might add), and copy the image to your own computer.

If you know a good bit more than I do about Web page construction, you might find RenderSoft VRML Editor 1.72 useful. It's a $15 shareware goodie that does as good a job of no-frills VMRL editing as well as the ones costing way, way more. It even works with OpenGL, something not found in another program costing less than $500. As it's described, it sounds like a good tool to teach yourself VMRL, also. Go to pachome2.pacific.net.sg/~jupboo/ for a trial spin.

Learn to use Web site graphics at Web Graphics on a Budget at mardiweb.com/web. Besides helping you learn to use Paint Shop Pro, it will teach you the ins and outs of creating and using a number of graphics for sprucing up your Web site. Another free graphics offering is Ulead's Graphics Optimization Toolkit, at www.webutilities.com -- it allows you to upload your graphics and tweak them using Ulead's software.

Another alternative for creating Web graphics is to try out the Web-based services of NetStudio, at www.netstudio.com. A good portion of NetStudio's graphics tools are free for surfers to use -- you can make buttons, banners, headlines, and photographic treatments on NetStudio's online graphics tools and download the results to your PC. Of course, NetStudio wants you to buy the retail package ($100), but this isn't a requirement.

Want access to a tremendous database of clip art and graphics? The folks at webspice.com offer subscription plans from $30/year to $130/year which allow you access to between 1 million and 2.2 million graphics images. Help in finding and selecting graphics is also available. The free tour lets you access over 10,000 images. ArtToday at www.arttoday.com provides a similar service, and even Microsoft gets into the act with their site at microsoft.com/clipgallerylive/.

Learn to make animated GIFs by downloading Choosy Mothers Choose GIF from Alchemy Mindworks at their Web site: www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html. You get to keep it for 30 days while you try it out, and if you want to keep it, it'll cost you $20. Another GIF animation shareware program worth evaluating is Animagic GIF Animator from Right to Left Software at www.rtlsoft.com/animagic. Microsoft's Web site features a free, no-frills GIF animator, but its Help features are non-existent; you'll need to download the Hands-On Animation Tutorial as well. And Xoom provides zillions of .JPGs, animated GIFs, and Java applets free for the download from xoom.com/home if you don't mind registering for them.

A neat way to simulate a faster download is to use the LOWSRC attribute with your Web graphics. Using this attribute in your HTML graphics coding lets MSIE or Netscape display a low-resolution version of a GIF or JPEG file while downloading the bigger, better version. This gives viewers something to look at while they wait for the slower download. This works especially well for image maps, since it shows the clickable hot spots before the graphic itself finishes loading, and impatient surfers can be on their way. (I'll leave it to you and your HTML manual to figure out the coding.) Of course, this requires that you actually have two copies of each graphic -- the high-res and low-res versions. Many people use smaller (thumbnail) images, or black-and-white copies. Of course, if you're using interlaced GIFs, this technique is unnecessary.

Building animated GIFs requires three basic tools: a graphics editor, an image optimizer, and an animator. Although expensive and full-featured components such as Adobe PhotoShop, Macromedia Fireworks, CorelDraw, and Equilibrium's DeBabelizer, are available for each of these, free- or shareware components that do the job are out there, also. If you're saving money, I'd recommend for the graphics editor the old warhorse, Paint Shop Pro (www.jasc.com), which also comes with a good animator, Animation Shop. Image optimizers, such as WebGraphics Optimizer 4.01 (www.webopt.com) for GIFs and CyberView Image 4.5.3 (www.cyberviewcd.com/cvimage/) for JPGs, reduce the size of your graphics, resulting in faster download times. Another good shareware animator is GIF Movie Gear, available from www.gamani.com/.

You can get a free animated GIF a day from www.animfactory.com/dailygif/today.html. If you'd rather do your plundering in bulk, copy free GIFs, borders, icons, etc. from their related site, www.animfactory.com. Their main site, www.mediabuilder.com, offers custom-made 3D text, buttons, animated banners, etc.

Speaking of GIFs, the yahoos at Unisys, who own the file-compression format used by GIF files, are asking owners of commercial Web sites to pay them yea bucks for the privilege of continuing to use GIF files on their sites. This is patently ridiculous, considering that GIFs have been freely used on the Web since the caveman days, but it seems to be making headway due to Unisys's clever finding of a loophole in a badly written section of U.S. patent law. The folks at burnallgifs.org are advocating that we all switch our GIFs to .PNG (Portable Network Graphic) format. The free utility gif2png can be had from www.tuxedo.org/~esr/gif2png/ for file conversion. Right now both MSIE and Netscape support PNG viewing, but not fully; the format tends to make older versions choke. Opera seems to do a somewhat better job of supporting the format. Check out graphicswiz.com/png/pngapps.html for a list of applications that support .PNG files. Am I switching over? No, since I'm not a commercial site, I don't have to worry. And lots of commercial sites don't seem to care, either, since Unisys doesn't seem to have the will or the resources to do more than annoy a few people (including calling Webmasters "crybabies" through e-mail -- does that tell you anything about the megaminds at Unisys?) and whip up some outrage in various small corners of the Internet. But it is something to think about, even if it is a classic illustration of the "tempest in a teapot" metaphor. (You might check out my SitePoint/Webmaster article on the subject at www.webmasterbase.com/article/628.) The Unisys copyright expires in June 2003, thank the graphics gods. But wait, there's a new one: Forgent Technologies is claiming to own the patent rights to the .JPEG format. Will this never cease? Read up on this one at www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,389261,00.asp.

Speaking of copyrights, let Creative Commons handle your copyrighted Web material. A visit to this site, at www.creativecommons.org/, helps you dedicate your creative works such as Web sites, scholarships, music, film, photography, literature, and courseware to the public domain, or retain copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. When you choose a license for your works, you'll get markup code to add to your Web pages to tag your works.

A free way to class up your Web pages is to download digitized versions of great paintings from sunsite.unc.edu/wm. A little Degas or Munch goes a long way to sprucing up your Web site; you can use them for desktop backgrounds also.

Find neato Web graphics and clip art for Web pages (or Junior's history paper) at sources such as www.arttoday.com, www.barrysclipart.com, www.microsoft.com/workshop/design/default.asp, home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites, and www.pageresource.com. All are freebies. Believe me, this is only the tip of the iceberg -- there are hundreds of sources for free Web graphics out there, just waiting for you to search them out. All the graphics on my site that were not created by me were taken from a variety of free graphics sites.

Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site is a book that comes highly recommended, as well as providing its own summation in its title. Check its related Web site at www.poorrichard.com/.

A number of online sources provide goodies for your Web site to host for free -- all you do is cut and paste the HTML code into your pages, and it pops up, ready for your site visitors to use. Techweb at www.techweb.com/ provides a number of freebies, including a Web encyclopedia that appears at the bottom of these pages. Online maps to get your visitors to your place of business are available from MapQuest at www.mapquest.com. FreeFind at www.freefind.com provides free search services. News headlines from iSyndicate at www.isyndicate.com are available in 10 different flavors, from sports to technology to business. Free e-mail services, including spam filters, ICQ integration, spell-checkers, and the ability to retrieve e-mail from other POP clients, is available from ZapZone Network at www.zzn.com.

Speaking of spam, Webmasters might want to visit this site: www.manastungare.com/asp/preventspam.asp. Why? Well, you can enter in your Web site's e-mail address and in return, this page will generate code that still allows visitors to send you e-mail, but will confuse spambots in their attempt to rip your e-mail address off of your site. Cool. (I use a JavaScript-generated e-mail address to fool the 'bots, but this methods works, too.)

Both Netscape and Microsoft provide the novice Webmaster with Web sites full of useful information. Check them out at developer.netscape.com/guides/tools and www.microsoft.com/workshop, respectively. Other good Web-building resources are given in my Tech Sites links.

There are two available plug-ins to MSIE 5 that might be useful to Web designers, one that lets developers view partial source code of any page and another that allows viewing of the DOM (Document Object Model) properties of a page in tree form. Download them free from www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/webaccess/ie5tools.asp.

Both Navigator and MSIE let you copy Web pages in HTML format to your own hard drive by calling up the page, clicking File and then Save As, giving it a name, and clicking Save. Why do this? You can learn a lot about using HTML by studying how someone else did their page. Don't just paste that file up on the Web and call it yours, however; that's plagarism.

Want to keep people from copying your HTML code? There's a free way to do it that will keep all but the most tech-savvy types from stealing your work. Download and install the JavaScript code for disabling the right-click function of a user's mouse while they browse your site. You can get the code from javascript.internet.com or any of several other free providers of JavaScript snippets. A sneaky way to fool the amateur is, at the very top, to add a line such as "!--SSI DHTML ERROR 402 - FILE NOT FOUND---" (replace the quotes with the greater-than and lesser-than brackets) and then about 30 blank lines in your HTML code. Your HTML code won't show up on the screen, and the average knucklehead won't scroll down to find it. If you really need to keep everyone out, go see the gurus at Digimarc (www.digimarc.com) and be prepared to lay out some bucks.

Sometimes there are Web pages in your site that you don't want accessed by search engines. If this is the case, you need to create a ROBOTS.TXT file (mentioned above). The easy way to do it is to go to www.rietta.com/robogen and use their $13 RoboGen utility to crank out the text file. The hard way (but not much harder, unless you're the owner of a large and complicated site) is to do it in a text editor such as Notepad and upload it to your server yourself. Let's get cranking. First, each section of your Robots file should include the name of the user agent, or robot, and the paths it may not follow. A list of the main search engines' robots is below:

• ALTA VISTA:Scooter, VScooter, Mercator

• EXCITE: Architext

• HOTBOT/AOL: Inktomi's Slurp

• INFOSEEK: Sidewinder, Mozilla

• LYCOS: T-Rex, Mozilla

• INKTOMI: Slurp

• GOOGLE: Backrub, Googlebot

• N. LIGHT: Gulliver

• WEBCRAWLER: Excites Architext

Remember, if you don't tell the robots not to access a particular directory path, they can and will stick their little insectoid noses in 'em. As I memtioned above, you can usually read another site's file by just requesting it from the server in a browser - for example: www.fubar.com/robots.txt. You'll see it as a simple text page, but it's easy to read. Now, let's give some examples:

• User-agent: *
  Disallow:
  The asterisk (*) in the User-agent field is shorthand for "all robots". Because nothing is disallowed, everything is allowed.

• User-agent: *
  Disallow: /cgi-bin/
  Disallow: /tmp/
  Disallow: /private/
  In this example, all robots can visit every directory except the three mentioned.

• User-agent: BadBot
  Disallow: /
   

• User-agent: *
  Disallow: /private/
  The BadBot robot is not allowed to see anything. The blank line indicates a new "record" - a new user agent command. All other robots can see everything except the "private" folder.

• User-agent: WeirdBot
  Disallow: /tmp/
  Disallow: /private/
  Disallow: /links/listing.html
   

• User-agent: *
  Disallow: /tmp/
  Disallow: /private/
  This one keeps the WeirdBot from visiting the listing page in the links directory, the tmp directory and the private directory. All other robots can see everything except the tmp and private directories. (If you think this is inefficient, then you're right.)

Good -- we've given a quick overview of the ROBOTS.TXT concept. There's one more thing to think about, though, especially for those of you with commercial sites and with confidential info on your pages. The best example is of a site that offers downloads of commercial software -- the buyer pays his or her money and is taken to a download page to get the goodies. You don't want any schmuck smart enough to peruse a ROBOTS text file to slide to your download page and download your programs without paying first. But, you don't want those pages indexed by search engines, either. What to do? First don't worry about that "robots.txt" file. Go ahead and list all the sensitive files you need to there -- this prevents them being listing in the search engines. But make sure all your sensitive files are in an unlinked, unknown sub-folder, or better still, protected by a CGI script. If you do use the less secure unknown sub-folder option then don't forget to add an "index.html" page. Otherwise the URL of the sub-folder displays a full file listing and links to all files in the directory. The "index.html" can say or do just about anything you wish. This can be a very simple HTML file that tells your visitors that they are not allowed to look at this sub-folder or it can be an HTML file that auto-redirects your visitor to another page. Just don't ever give people a free listing of everything in a directory by not having a default "index.html" in **any** directory -- it's a killer. Now, if your site is not commercial then what goes into the robots.txt file is mainly for cosmetic and for privacy reasons. But for a commercial site, it's your money we're talking about here. Confused? You won't be after visiting some of these tutorial and tips sites for ROBOTS files: info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/faq.html, bots.internet.com/, and searchenginewatch.internet.com/webmasters/spiders.html. Check your syntax at www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~sxw/robots/check/.

One of the favorite mistakes Web designers make is using overly fancy color schemes. The first goal of any Web page is to be easily read; black text on white or near-white backgrounds may be boring to some, but you can by cracky read the damn thing. White text on a dark background can be tricky. Even worse, some people like to use dark text on darker backgrounds -- say, purple on black. Not only does this cause impatience, headaches, and eyestrain, this challenges the user's monitor. If the monitor is only slightly out of calibration, the colors "separate" and look awful. Pink on red or dark pink is another no-no that I commonly see, usually on teenage girls' web sites devoted to N'Sync or their boyfriends. Ouch.

Scarf up thousands of free fonts at AcidFonts (www.acidfonts.com/), FontFace (www.fontface.com/), Fontasaurus (www.fontosaurus.com/) Larabie Fonts (www.larabiefonts.com/), and Pizzadude (www.pizzadude.dk), among many, many others. Nothing like using strange and obscure fonts to jazz up your site...though if your readers don't have the particular font, they'll see your text in plain old Times New Roman or Verdana. You might want to convert text blocks in particularly odd fonts into graphics.

Another no-no is to overload your Web page with graphics. Sure, graphics look cool and snazz up a boring text page, but they take longer to load, especially when they come in multiples. A good rule of thumb is, if your page takes more than 30 seconds to load, do something different. Usually you can start by paring out some unnecessary graphics, reducing the graphics' sizes, or at the very least, using interlaced graphics that give the user the reassurance that something is indeed coming up. Use .GIF graphics when you can to save download time. The other graphics format used on Web sites, .JPG, looks better but loads way slower. .GIF only supports 256 colors, also. Graphics file sizes are a big factor in download times, so keep your graphics files as small as possible (below 30kb is good), reduce the height and width of large images to 640x480 when you can, and if you use .JPG images, compress them whenever possible.

Speaking of theft, nicking other people's graphics is quite common among Web builders. It's not exactly legal, but if you can handle the moral implications of data theft, you can do it either in Navigator or MSIE by right-clicking the image, clicking Save Picture As, giving it a name, and clicking Save.

Another .GIF trick is to improve the layout of your page by using a 1x1-pixel transparent .GIF file to add precise spacing around HTML items. Just insert the file using the standard <IMG SRC> tag wherever you need a little spacing on a page, especially between text and graphics. Set the Border to 0, and set the Height and Width to the desired values to create the extra space.

When you create blocks or items of text (such as bulleted lists using the LI tag) and want a new font to highlight your list, use only one FONT tag to format the list. Using separate FONT tags for each bulleted item will force some browsers to add unwanted spaces between the items.

If you want to insert multiple or complex tables inside your Web page, build them in a scratch file, test them there, and only after tweaking and repairing should you insert them into your page. Tables are HTML creations that often cause Webmasters tremendous headaches; fix their problems before turning them loose on your page. Want an easy way out? Try the Accessible Table Builder from www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/accessible-table-builder_step1.asp.

It's a lot easier to organize your page with subfolders, even if it is more troublesome in writing your hyperlinks. Subfolders particularly come in handy for organizing large graphics directories.

Putting together a Web page and wondering what resolution is best for scanned photos? For images that will appear as thumbnails, 100-by-75 dpi should be sufficient. For full-sized images, try 640-by-480 dpi.

Say you've gotten your Web site up and running, and now you want to know a little more about who is visiting, what they think of it, and what keeps them coming back. Before you sink money into an expensive Web analysis tool (and drown in the subsequent reams of data that program creates), try a basic tool for free. Marketwave's Hit List Standard is a free download from www.marketwave.com, and Microsoft gives away Site Server Express from www.microsoft.com/iis.

Your Web site should be accessible to everyone, including those of us with disabilities. Visit bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp and let "Bobby" test-drive your site; just plug in the URL of your page and let Bobby take over. If Bobby approves your site, you get to display his seal of approval. Warning: Bobby's not an easy fellow to please. You can see Bobby's seal on the home page of this site, and yes, I had to make some changes to earn it. It's worth it. More info on accessibility can be had at www.microsoft.com/enable/ (Microsoft's explanation and horn-blowing on the changes made in MSIE to accommodate less abled users, who consistently rank MSIE dead last behind Opera and Netscape in usability) and the evolving set of accessibility standards is posted at www.w3.org/WAI/UA/WD-UAAGIO-IMP-20001101.

I'm not particularly bent on offering lots of help to commercial Web designers and Web merchants, but there are a few tidbits I can throw to you corporate wolves out there. Freestore.com at www.freestore.com/ and Freemerchant.com (www.freemerchant.com/), both want to host your online store for free. So does Bigstep.com at www.bigstep.com/, but if you want to accept credit cards, Bigstep charges $15/month. You can use HyperBanner at www.hyperbanner.com/ to get your site noticed; by registering with them and agreeing to place two of their banners on your site, they'll place one of yours on someone else's site. MSN LinkExchange at www.linkexchange.com/ and SmartAge at www.smartage.com/ offer similar services. HyperBanner's best feature is their ability to run banners on international sites, but LinkExchange seems to provide the best overall service of the three. SmartOnline.com at www.smartonline.com/ provides a number of useful tools for the beginning online (and offline) entrepeneur, many of which are free and none for over $25. ECongo offers free hosting for small Net-based businesses. Zoomerang is a new, online service for creating and managing surveys. Basic functions are free; fee-based premium services are upcoming. Skate over to www.zoomerang.com/ for more info. It's still in the developmental stages right now; you may want to bookmark it for future use. Surveymonkey is another great way to conduct online surveys, and basic surveys are free. Need customer info? Collect it for free using the services at www.response-o-matic.com/. Want to offer freemail on your site? Check out www.bigmailbox.com/; these guys offer an unlimited number of free e-mail boxes with your domain name as the address. Amazon.com's zShops allow you to sell up to 3000 items on their site for $10/month. Other online resellers that will let you use their sites to sell your stuff are Kurant Storesense.com (www.storesense.com/), BuyItOnline (www.buyitonline.com/), Yahoo Store (store.yahoo.com/), OhGolly (www.ohgolly.com/) and iCat Web Store (www.icat.com/).

Check out SitePoint at www.sitepoint.com/ for lots of tips on managing small-business Web sites and Web design in general. The fact that I used to write for them has nothing to do with this recommendation....

Take your Web site global with these goodies that give the folks in Pago Pago a decent shot at reading your Web gems. Online translations of your deathless prose are available at babelfish.altavista.com/, www.babylon.com/, and www.freetranslations.com/, but I wouldn't bet the farm on either one's accuracy. Competent human translators are available at aquarius.net/ and www.glennsguide.com/, but it won't be free -- estimate the costs at www.webbudget.com/. If you have a really big site to translate, check out the Internationalization of the Internet pages at www.isoc.org:8080, which offer plenty of tips on creating multilingual sites. An overview of how to specify languages in your Web pages is available at www.w3.org/TR/html40/struct/dirlang.html, and the same site offers help with technical issues for multilingual sites at www.w3.org/International/. Check out The Unicode Standard www.unicode.org for info on how to enable Web browsers to encode all the characters of all the world's written languages, along with character code charts. Microsoft's Web Developer Workshop offers a helpful white paper at msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/management/intl/locprocess.asp. You can register for country-specific domain names such as .uk for Britain, .fr for France, etc., at Network Solutions' international site, idNames (www.idnames.com/), or you can directly access the registrars for each country. Lists of country codes and links to their specific registrars can be found at www.iana.org/ and www.icann.org/.

Talk to Federal Express (www.fedex.com/) and UPS (www.ups.com/) for overseas shipping costs for your e-commerce site, and check out Oanda's Currency Site ( www.oanda.com/) for info on currency-exchange rates, along with a handy conversion calculator that you can include on your own site. Find out more about local customs for particular places at www.ginfo.net/ and www.glreach.com/gbc/.

The next wave of Web creation is the XML language. It's a hopped-up descendant of SGML/HTML. Still haven't learned HTML yet? SGML, DHTML, XML, XHTML, and VRML are just acronyms to you? You're about to get lapped.

Burgeoning Webmasters need to learn about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Essentially CSS allows the Web designer to control the "style" of a Web page -- fonts, colors used, at the beginning of the page or as a global control. It also allows the use of "layers" in a Web page which can allow the source code to be invisible to the casual user (a JavaScript code controls the layers). This is getting into DHTML territory -- CSS controlled by JavaScript -- but since Microsoft and Netscape have incompatible programming methods for DHTML and the WC3 hasn't yet decided on a DHTML standard, only the most advanced Webmasters need to worry with DHTML as yet. Two (of very many) good CSS sources are www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/ and www.mako4css.com/, and a good beginner's tutorial is at webdesign.about.com/c/ec/30.htm.

Too lazy, er, busy to learn CSS? Let these sites generate CSS code for your pages: www.fu2k.org/alex/css/layouts/3Col_OrderedAbsolute.mhtml, www.csscreator.com/version1/, nide.snow.utoronto.ca/css/, www.cathyjenkins.com/downloads/css.html, www.xmldir.de/quickcss/, www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php, and www.wannabegirl.org/firdamatic/.

Got a .PDF file you want converted to an HTML file? Send it in an e-mail to Adobe at pdf2html@adobe.com -- leave the subject and message fields blank, and send the file as an attachment. You'll have it returned to you in a few minutes, freshly converted to HTML. You can also send documents to pdf2txt@adobe.com for conversion into .TXT format.

If you're interested in how "child-friendly" your site is, have it rated by the Internet Content Ratings Association at www.icra.org/_en/webmasters/. You can use the organization's rating of your site in a META tag:

Best of all, it's free.

There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of HTML/Web design training sites out there, more than I could possibly list. But one you ought to scope out is Stimulus (www.stimulus.com/). It's a terrific site that shows you how to design Web pages using basic HTML as well as more sophisticated languages and techniques such as CGI, JavaScript, and Perl, and shows you how they're used. Very cool. I'm also fond of Lissa Explains It All, an HTML and Web help site put together by a high school student. The site looks like Barbie designed it, and it says it's targeted at kids, but the content is very helpful for anyone. Lissa is one savvy young lady. Check it out at www.lissaexplains.com/. One I've just come across is The FuzzPad HTML Tester, found at www.fuzzylu.com/docs/html/js/home.htm, which allows you to "test drive" HTML code as you write it. You write the code in the left frame and view it in the right. I like it.

Internet commentator John Dvorak has been doing some productive thinking on the future of the Web, particularly in the area of souping up the functionality of hyperlinks. I find his idea of "dimensional linking" fascinating. Read it for yourself in his "Missing Links" column at www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s=1500&a=25363,00.asp.

Check out the somewhat tongue-in-cheek article about Web grammar at webworst.about.com/library/weekly/aa042701a.htm. If you can't figure out the seemingly random capitalizations, strange acronyms, and virtual dearth of punctuation currently in use among "kewl" Web writers, this article may give you some insight. WeB gRamER RoOlZ! Not.