"Wow! This homepage is a lovely one! I wish I could have one and tell all my friends about it and submit it to various search engines and consequently, my homepage become popular."
Have you browse a lot in the internet? How many web sites have you seen it is wonderful? Many? Few? Some? Do you envy them and keep saying, "I want a lovely homepage!"? Well... Let me tell you honestly, making homepage is not an easy job and often needs updates. You must keep updating it so that your homepage will look very interesting.
To my experience, there is two ways of making homepages. One way is to learn all the html codes and create a homepage. Another way is to purchase or download a editor like Netscape Composer. This editor is based on 'What You See Is What You Get'. I would call these editors as WYSIWYG editor. For my recommendation, I would advise you to use html codes to edit your homepage so that you can add javascripts. But if you find it hard to learn html codes, then you better use the WYSIWYG editor espcially if you are a beginner and have no experience in making homepage
You must burn a midnitght oil in learning the html codes if you really want to have a wonderful, beautiful and interesting homepage unless you are using WYSIWYG editor. Learning javascript and some applet codes can help you to build up a lovely and creative homepage. You can learn this by buying a book or going to web sites which have some lessons on these things.
Let me give you some tips to make your site a nice one. If you have a new site, plan your homepage. Choose a topic for your homepage. After planning, put in some texts first and of course a title for your homepage. After that, try arranging the texts (make it neat and nice), choose a suitable font type and font colour which has a contrasting colour with the background colour (preferably). Also choose a reasonable size for your fonts.
Thirdly, try creating your own graphics or you can find some graphics from some other web sites which offers free graphics. Make sure you don't take copyrighted images. If you want to create your own graphics, you may use programmes like: Corel Draw and Adobe Photoshop. Take note that a picture cannot be viewed if the extension is not 'jpg' or 'gif'. Extensions like 'bmp' and 'cdr' are neither viewable in Internet Explorer nor Netscape. Always convert it to 'jpg' or 'gif' first before inserting an image or graphics in your own homepage. Also take note not to put too much in a page. It can only make your visitors angry. If you want to put many graphics or images, then put in 'WIDTH' and 'HEIGHT' attributes in the 'IMG SRC' tag. It is also advisable to put in 'ALT' attribute in the 'IMG SRC' tag. When you have graphics in your homepage, try arranging them in a proper manner.
Lastly, you may add some javascripts and midi music in your own homepage but don't insert them in your homepage too much. It will only make your visitors angry because the load time (time to fully load a web site) might take extremely long. So, try to make everything as simple as possible. Add only a few javascripts and other add-ons (midifiles, applet etc.)
Two last advices which I am going to give you free of charge is: don't expect perfection in your homepage. No one can be perfect in making a homepage no matter how nice, lovely or how enticing is a web page. There is always room for improvement. The other advice is always be sensitive with visitors' criticisms and comments. Their criticisms may always help you.
Homepages which may help you learn html codes:
HTMLgoodies - learn html
Javagoodies - learn javascript.
Written by the owner of the homepage