Let's get your web site off the ground, you can learn to 'fly' later...

Big Nose Bird may have the silliest name, but it is without a doubt one of the best places to start. His site offers free 'easy to understand' tips and tricks for beginners to intermediate webmasters. Everything from just the basics to forms, tables, java script, basic CGI and Perl. Bruce has years of experience and is willing to help you if he can... just e-mail him.

Web Master Sites is another excellent starting place. Terri is now offering an on line class where she teaches the art of Webmastering for a nominal fee. The 'classroom' connects all the students in a class via e-mail! A truly interesting approach. Any member of the class can ask any questions and the whole class 'reads' the question and response by e-mail! I wish I had known her when I first started.

In lieu of just a color background, I have found two very special people with artistic talent and a desire to help that is as refreshing as spring. Arna at The Humble Bee is in Norwich, but speaks very good English. And Vanessa at Nessa's Buttons and Borders. Both offer their art work to you for free. If you do not see what you are looking for, just e-mail them! They are eager to help in anyway they can. Please sign their guest book when you are there and tell them 'Claudia sent you'.

Zyris gives you the opportunity to create your own heading graphic (or whatever text graphic you choose to use it for) with all kinds of choices as to style, color, font, size, etc. And best of all It's Free.

Need an e-mail style form for your guests? Free Form will design one while you wait, for free!

Accelerate your website with The Gif Wizard has a unique subscription type of service for $14.95, which allows you to 'shrink, lighten and resize your web site graphics' online. The neatest part is that their program can both lighten and shrink an animated .gif without losing the animation. I have tried it, and I was truly surprised! Not only did it help my web pages load faster, but also cut my server space down by one third and now I have 30% more space! :-)

The Mining Company This site tends to be a slow connection, but the contents throughout their site is a GOLD Mine all the way! Just use their search engine, set for their site only, run a search on anything from graphics to html and you could lose yourself for days!

Want to double check your web sites HTML syntax, spelling, load time, links, etc. Go on over to Web Site Garage. Park your URL and hit 'go'. The checker will verify the general status of your site. However, do not take the 'grading' to heart. It does not like abbreviations in spelling and some unique words, it does not like some Meta Tag codes, it measures the site popularity using Info Seek as the only source. So consider his 'good' grade as an actual 'excellent', once you've fixed what you can.

How about checking your web site for 'Browser Friendliness'. Bobby can do that for you. You pick the browser you are curious about, tell him the URL and he will check for that type of coding. In my opinion, WebTV is the hardest code, but MSIE and Netscape have their differences too! And AOL is another story all together. Just depends on what type of site you have and what you are aiming for...

What about a graphics mangler? Pixel Sight has taken the net by storm. Once a free sight offering the ability to create and 'mangle' to your hearts content. However it was so popular that they had to move to a larger server, and thus when open again (soon I am told) will be charging a subscription fee of $48.00, I believe. Hopefully he will show us some examples, or offer a one time free pass.

Having trouble making your gif's transparent? I found a site that will do it for you! Ckeck out Fefe's Tranparancy Apparatus. Although the 'apparatus' server was down the last time I checked,it actually does make the specified gif transparent!

Another traffic draw (to some degree) is a Chat Room, and it too is free. Mine actually gets more use than one would think, and I am sure it is because people can set a time to ‘meet' there. I know of a mother and daughter (soon to be parent and grandmother) who like to meet in mine, because it is more likely to be private, and offers that option. It is a free Java Applet that can be found at Parachat.

For kids and adults alike there is always games. You can find quite a few free games at Gamelan and Java Boutique. Actually he has applets in all kinds of categories.

Free Java Applets can be found at Demicron and Entanke. Both sites offer supurb applets for menus, index, messaging, etc.

TIP: One thing to remember when scanning your pictures in, always save 'photo' type pictures a .jpg's. It is a compressed file format and will take up somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 off the file size verses the .gif format.

Now that you have all these graphics and Java Applets, you will need away to upload them. I highly recommend WS-FTP. A lot of people like a program called 'Cute', however I find WS-FTP much easier to use and configure. Ws-Ftp offer's an evaluation copy for you to try out, and I am sure you will agree with me that it's the best File Transfer Program.

And since I am already off the graphics subject (but still in the design aspect), I recently found an excellent software program that will search and replace in HTML documents. It is an absoulte life saver for any webmaster with very many pages to update. The program is made by Funduc. And I should also add support is 'superior'. When I thank him for his program, I added that it would be really nice if it had a spell checker too. His reply was that he will see what he can do! And I have no doubt he will try.

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