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'After getting, bizarrely, a webpage in Swedish, I activated my account by clicking on a link and then, after waiting for a minute or two with baited breath for another email, I got to look at my brand new website.'

Suzanne Elvidge builds her first website online

Online website building I've just done something new. And it was all rather exciting. And legal. I've just made a website...

I've never done that before. I started at Lycos Tripod, which offers free web hosting and signed up - I already have a Lycos email address, so it didn't take too long, but I still had to type in my snail mail address like just about every single website on earth demands these days.

After getting, bizarrely, a webpage in Swedish, I activated my account by clicking on a link in an email, and then, after waiting for a minute or two with baited breath for another email, I got to look at my brand new website, which said that it's under construction.

So, to construct it. I started off at the WebBuilder, which promised to make me a website in five easy steps... let's see.

Clicked on create a site, selected a girlie pink template... and... nothing. Just a blank page. Tried again with a boy's bugs and flies template, just in case it was objecting to my taste, but still nada.

Browser compatibility

After a bit of searching I realised it was because I use Mozilla Firefox, a rather nice browser with built in pop-up blocker and a few other nice whistles and bells instead of Internet Explorer (IE).

This web builder only supports IE, unfortunately. So, I tried again with Internet Explorer with a techie template in purple, and still nothing.

This time it was, because I've got the pop-up blocker activated on my Google toolbar, which stops all those very irritating pop-up ads.

Third time lucky... a pop-up that is editable just like a word processor. I moved from page to page, editing as I went - it asks you

if you want to save at each stage. The template I used gives places for a CV, photos, hobbies and links. Images can be linked to parts of your new site, or to external websites.

Each step is quite slow because it saves everything, but that's all to the good, really. Within the template, font colours, sizes and styles are all editable.

Changes

On to the next stage - publishing. I clicked on preview, made a few changes, clicked the 'Publish' button, created a directory entry for Lycos, and, hey presto, there it was.

Following a quick proofread (of course, I immediately saw typos as soon as I published it) you can send an email out to your friends to get them to look at it.

So - actually a fairly painless process, once I'd bypassed the first few bugs. And I ended up with a simple website in not much more than an hour or so.

That's the simplest way to create a site. Despite it being based on a template, there is a reasonable amount of flexibility - using the top bar, you can add new pages, add new content, change colours and designs, and publish the edited version to the web.

However, if you want to do something a bit more complicated, Lycos also includes WebFTP, which allows more complex editing, previewing and publishing, by uploading a website from your computer to your Tripod account online.

It can link into the web publishers Microsoft FrontPage, and also works with the language PHP and MySQL databases to create dynamic websites.

Maintenance

Because this is a free hosting service, you have to log in every so often to keep the site live, and you have a limited size for your website, in this case 50 MB.

Other free hosting services with online web-builders include 123 freehost whose tutorial makes it look pretty simple, and Freeservers offers a free hosting with an online web-builder and claims to be one of the easiest anywhere.

Most paid-for ISPs provide web space - this is probably the best way to go if you want to do something bigger.

So, join the Internet revolution, and book your page in cyberspace! It's far easier than it looks, and it might even get you started in a whole new role.

If you have a surefish.co.uk account, then you have webspace to publish your own website(s).

For our interactive guide to setting up your website, click here.

For frequently asked questions about surefish webspace, click here. To sign up to surefish.co.uk, click here.