Q: I don't have a web page now, don't know if I (our school, my organization, or company) will be getting one. Can I design web pages anyway, off-line on my computer here?

A: Yes! Not only that, you will do almost all your web page design offline, and keep at your designing till you've got it right, before uploading it for the world to see!

Q: should I take the time to do this if there's no prospects of going web in the immediate future?

A: Well, as a general rule "be prepared" is a good one. But here's some more specific reasons.

1. If you're a teacher, your local pages can be run through NetScape, and they're a wonderful way to show off students' work -- artwork, writing -- with neat indexes, photos and descriptions of students. If you have a scanner -- the most important purchase after the first computer/printer combo for any school -- you can scan little kids' writings and drawings, photos of students and school events. It can be a virtual yearbook on-line. Kids love it, so do parents on school-visiting days. The software (NetScape) is free to students and educators, so you can actually give parents copies of this for home computers.

2. If you belong to an organization, a sample web page is something to show your bosses and your board, to explain how your organization can benefit, and share info with as many of 33,000,000 people who might access your pages.

3. If you belong to a business, same thing. Try making up sample ads, sample catalogs of arts, T-shirts, buttons -- things you normally sell. Make up powwow announcements.

4. Make up other types of announcements or ads that might appeal to a Tribal Council -- your casino, other tribal enterprises, for example. Put a sample Tribal newsletter on.

5. Add links to other native web pages that show off something similar to what you hope to do. Then show this on your computer (or anyone's) when you're trying to explain it to people who don't know anything about InterNet or the Web: "We could do something like this, IF...."

Q: If money, true? We don't got....

A: Yeah, tell me 'bout it. I do all these pages without any financial support (and it's not my job) in my now non-existent spare time. I'm allowed space on the Fond du Lac Tribal College server, which is 200 miles north of me, and my first development site was 1500 miles away in Massachusetts, I'm not even sure where it is physically located. The cost of setting up and running a server is considerable, especially for reservations and reserves remote from local InterNet on-ramps. It is much cheaper to get space for a site on a commercial site in a major city (if your pages are commercial). In Minneapolis, you could do that (complete with an automatic credit-card or other order form, several mailboxes, and your own short domain name) for around $100/month, not counting page design costs. If you are non-profit (or a school) you can probably eventually persuade some university or ORG to let you have space on their webserver free. It doesn't matter where they are, so long as you can get on via your own account locally, you can upload and manage your pages from anywhere.

Q: What about those page design costs?

A: About $1500 per web page minimum (and up, up, up, depending on complexity, use of server utilities and programs, etc.), so that's where you come in. It is certainly worthwhile for your organization to give you some time on-the-job, and on-line to train yourself!

Q: OK, how do I get started? What do I need?

A: You already have Netscape or an equivalent browser, to be seeing these pages! On your PC or Mac there are small word-processors that work in ASCII, that don't do the fancy formatting codes you don't want on these pages anyway. You definitely need some kind of a paint program (Adobe PhotoShop is the preferred one, but I can't afford that and make do with a lesser one) and there is some low-cost shareware you can download and try out for free for manipulating your graphics -- I have links to a number of sources for these for PC's and Macs both on other tutorial pages here.

Q: Then what?

A: Then download the Maricopa tutorial from my Tutorials Page -- when you go to their pages from my TUTORIALS link, you'll be instructed how. You can get the packages for either a PC or a Mac, and take the entire tutorial off-line, so you don't run up extra-hours Net charges, or hog a single InterNet connection used by others at your organization. This will give you a good basic grounding -- you'll create a modestly complex on-line science page about volcanoes, step by step (you can see an example of it -- it was almost the first thing I myself did, learning, last year). Before you do that, create a couple of subdirectories to hold your web projects. I favor keeping graphics separate from the web pages, in a subdirectory below those pages, but you might start by just mingling everything in one subdirectory while you're first learning.

Q: OK, I've completed all 15 lessons, and got my Volcanoes file working. I feel I understand use of those HTML codes to make things happen onscreen. Are there things I could do if my pages were on an actual web server that I can't do locally, like this?

A: Yes, but most of these require some advanced knowledge. True interactives -- all forms except the simplest "mail this to my email address" like I use -- make use of programs that run on the server, to extract and use data from forms (which you can easily prepare). This will always require cooperation from someone who runs that server, even if you have the script or C program to do it.

Imagemaps -- those often large graphics with clickable action areas -- (at present) require similar cooperation, although you can do everything (with several simple shareware utilities) except the final step of making the server acknowledge your imagemap and act accordingly. Until you have help from someone who is running the server your web pages are on, you cannot do those things, and other, more complex things you'll see on web pages of adepts. For example the fancy background tiles generator on my TUTORIAL GRAPHICS page, or the complex ethnobotany databases linked-to on my Plants Pages that are run by the National Agricultural Labs' Informatics server.

You cannot do credit-card order forms (if you are commercial); this is one of the services that commercial service providers can offer. Don't worry about that for a while. Get some nice-looking pages going locally.

Q: OK, I'm ready to get started! Now what?

A: Ahem! To be continued later! But ... a thought for you now. The best way to learn how to do all those neat things you see is to surf a lot, look at a lot of pages. Use VIEW SOURCE on NetScape's VIEW menu, and examine the codes they used to get those nice effects. Sometimes it will be pretty simple, you can see at once what was done (but take notes anyway). Sometimes you can and should save their page, and examine it more carefully offline. You shouldn't steal anyone's pages or graphics -- that really makes us mad, and could get you sued (since most web pages are copyright). What none of us minds is your downloading text pages to study conveniently offline the sometimes complex HTML coding we used to get various effects. We like it when others learn from what we did, that's how most of us learned, too.

Take a VIEW SOURCE look at this page. How did I get margins? Netscape doesn't allow it, and there are (aside from lists) no HTML codes for it. Yep, I used tables. It would be too much trouble to do a new row for every paragraph. This whole Q & A section is all inside one big long cell of a 1-column table which is centered onscreen. I didn't steal that idea from someone else (though probably many others are doing it), I had worked with menu tables, and figured this should work, when I wanted screen-page margins for looks and for better teacher printouts that don't jam the left edge of the page. I figured this would probably work, and it does. Experimenting is a big part of your learning ....

Q: How did you get that pretty background color? And those menu frames?

A: Ha, you noticed! I had a totally gorgeous color -- dusty violet that was set with BGCOLOR="#42426f". It made nifty looking fat frames on tables where I set border= to a rather large number, 10 or 20. But then I got Netscape 2, and the background color was an undistinguished dark blue. So I'm using a background tile whose color is similar to the one Netscape 2 doesn't show right. I don't like those fat-solid-frame menus so well, either.

Q: WHAT!?! You mean my pages might look different to different people?

A: Oh, yeah, and you'll get emails from 'em too. They'll never tell you what software versions they're using. I might add -- colors look different on Macs and PC's too.

Q: That line -- it's kinda 3D, lavendar rod or something....

A: That's a graphic. Repeated to give a design unity (and also because the <hr> lines look bad on most background tiles), it also means little overhead (load time, server work). We'll discuss that aspect of page design-- time -- next, when I get some time to do it.