This is a list of common problems and their solutions culled from the demon.homepages.authoring newsgroup. It is in six sections each dealing with a particular area of authoring your own web page.

  1. What are the best tools with which to create web pages?
  2. Any tips on design?
  3. How do I validate my pages to ensure that they meet standards?
  4. Web users with disabilities have complained that my pages are hard to use. What can I do?
  5. How do I get my site onto the web?
  6. Oops! I made a mistake and need to correct things. How do I do it?
  7. May I use my own CGI scripts?
  8. How do I add a visit counter to my site?
  9. How do I set/reset the counter?
  10. Some of my internal links are not working. What is wrong?

1 What are the best tools with which to create web pages?

While having a dedicated program to create the HTML for web pages is nice it is not essential. Simple text editiors such as Vi and clones (for Unix/Linux and Windows systems) and Notepad (for Windows systems) may be used to write the HTML. They are not as easy and you need to learn at least the basics for HTML but then that is no bad thing. One advantage that these "tools" have over the commercial packages is that the code produced is likely to be as lean as you can get. The advantage is that you are likely to already have one of these on your system so the cost is zero. The disadvantage is that it takes time to create a page unless you have some scripting mechanism to remove the majority of the work.

That said, there are a number of tools, either free, limited versions or full commercial versions that are available to help you on your way.

The first, again free for most, is to use the "Save as HTML" option in your word processor. MS Word and the word processor in Star Office have this capability. The advantages are that you can layout the page using familiar tools and methods. The disadvantages are that the pages are often full of unnecessary HTML and/or proprietry code.

Of the full blown HTMl tools choose among the following (in alphabetical order)

2 Any tips on design?

Design is one of those things: you can either do it or you can't! If you are in the latter then you can do no better than the O'Reilly book "Web Design in a Nutshell 2nd Edition" by Jennifer Niederst ISBN 0-596-00196-7. The book is more concerned with the correct and portable use of tags and techniques rather than which colours go with which.

3 How do I validate my pages to ensure that they meet standards?

4 Web users with disabilities have complained that my pages are hard to use. What can I do?

In order to allow those with disabilities to access your website there is a set of standards to which your HTML code should conform. The first place to start is.

5 How do I get my site onto the web?

Once you have created your site and verified that all the links work as you expect etc, you need to upload it to the homepage server. This is done via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for which you will need an ftp client.

FTP clients come with most operating systems these days, unfortunately for the mouse mad generation these are usually command line based. Not only are these rather hard to control if you are not used to them but they have different modes for text and binary files.

In contrast there are a variety of free GUI front ends to the basic clients that follow the normal windowing conventions such as drag and drop. These usually permit the transfer of whole directory structures and auto-detect the difference between binary and text files.

Again in alphabetical order:

6 Oops! I made a mistake and need to correct things. How do I do it?

Updating is a simpler matter than a full upload: normally it is only a case of adding or replacing one or two files at a time. If you are adding

7 May I use my own CGI scripts?

Demon do not permit the use of CGI scripts on their general user homepages but they do provide three CGI scripts of their own for you to use. These are the counter, the form

8 How do I add a visit counter to my site?

Puts a five figure LED style counter at the desired location. Demon provide the following tag for you to use. 

<img src="/cgi-bin/count" alt="Counter">

Note that only one counter is permitted per site.

9 How do I set/reset the counter?

The counter CGI script places a file in the root directory of your site called "count.txt". This merely contains the value shown in the counter and may be altered by uploading another file of the same name containing the desired value. Not that you would fake the visit count to your site would you? :-)

10 Internal links not working

If you have written your pages on a Windows system then there is one thing you need to be aware of before uploading your pages. That is, the Demon servers are UNIX based and all file and pathnames are case sensitive. Therefore the case of the link on the page and the target of the link must match in case. "Text.css" is not the same as "text.css".