You’ve visited your niece’s poetry page, checked out your son’s gaming site, perhaps even peeked into your neighbour’s family nest on the web. You admire their creativity and listen to their enthusiastic tales about new friends they’ve met through the Internet. Yet you shake your head at anyone who urges you to take your cross stitching hobby online. No, you’re a complete airhead what comes to computers, let alone the Internet. You couldn’t do it.

Except you can. Building a website isn’t overwhelmingly difficult, and it is fun. You will likely meet others with the same interests, get to exchange ideas, and broaden your world.

Deciding the topic of your website

A website with a mere “Hi, I’m Margie and live in Oklahoma. I have 3 great kids and 5 sweet grandkids. Thanks for coming, bye!” isn’t very interesting. You can naturally put up a website with any information you like, but the trick to getting visitors to stay is to put up some content. Think about your hobbies and passions. Which ones play a central part in your life? If cross stitching is your hobby of choice, why not a site featuring your masterpieces, favourite patterns and even future projects? Or if family research is your fancy, how about a site featuring your genealogy and names? You could track down a long lost relative, you know.

Planning your site content

Begin by planning your website first, don’t worry about the technical aspects yet. Write the texts you want on your site, and map out the sections you would like to have (e.g. “My Designs,” “My Patterns” and “Links”). If you intend to put photos on your site, collect those and check that they are proper size. Too many large photos will easily keep visitors from coming again, so try to keep your file sizes below 100 kilobytes each (“KB”). You can check the file size by locating the folder where your photo is (for example via “My Computer”). Right-click on the photo and choose “Properties” to see the file size. You can resize your photos in Windows Paint, any graphics program, or the software that came with your digital camera (if you have one).

The format of your photos should be either JPEG or GIF. JPEG is the standard file format for photos that have many colors, while a GIF can only have 256 colors, but it has a more effective compression engine. GIF is particularly good for images with fewer colors (for example web graphics and animations). JPEG is better for photos with many colors and hues, but the file size will be larger. If you have a file in some other format, you can convert it to JPEG (or GIF) by opening the file in Windows Paint and choosing “Save As.” Choose the appropriate file format in the drop down menu below the file name, and click “Save.” Create a new folder and save all your website photos and texts there.