Remember, the address for your cattery website is called a URL, short for Universal Resource Locator. Web pages have URLs that start with the characters "http://" (for HyperText Transfer Protocol), followed by the name of the Web server where the page is physically located, followed by the directory where the page is located and the name of the page itself.
Here's an example:
http://www.fanciers.com/people/tailsend.html
In this example, the Web server is "www.fanciers.com" which is the server that handles the Cat Fanciers website. On that server, there is a directory called "people" which contains individual cattery websites for some of the people on the Fanciers mailing list. In the "people" directory, there is a file called "tailsend.html" which is the HTML file for the Tailsend Cattery website.
The pages on the World Wide Web are formatted for viewing through a language known as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It consists of "tags" that surround your text to format it, and then basically disappear when your document is viewed through a web browser, such as Netscape.
All tags (with a few exceptions) are started with a command within brackets <> and must be closed with a slash command </>. Tags must also be closed in the reverse order to which they were opened, e.g. HTML is opened first and closed last as in the example below. All documents MUST start with the following tags:
<HTML>
<TITLE> title of document</TITLE>
<BODY>
After which, you put your text in this area, and then the document MUST end with
</BODY>
</HTML>
The text in the body of your document should be broken down into paragraphs. The tag for a new paragraph is <P> and this is one of two tags that does not require a closing tag. Therefore the above sample would look like:
<HTML>
<TITLE> title of document</TITLE>
<BODY>
<p>Your text will be in this area
</BODY>
</HTML>
On a web browser, this would simply appear as:
Your text will be in this area
You do not need a special program to write a document for the WWW - any word processor will do, as long as the document is saved in ASCII text. There are, however, a number of editor programs that will automatically add the basic HTML tags to a document. Many of these have evaluation versions which can be downloaded directly from the WWW, and come in versions for either Window or Macintosh. You can find these through any search engine, by searching for "HTML editor" or through a search at Tucows.com
