The Internet TESL Journal

This handout will help you to make an interesting web page in English using the simple text based editor included in Netscape Navigator 3 Gold.

First Step

Key Points in Web Page Design

Content

• Give information about yourself for example hobbies, research, hometown etc in a logical way.

Text and Links

• Watch your spelling and grammar and avoid sentences which are too long.
• Break up your text into chunks as these are easy to read.
• To make a hypertext link click the make link icon (it looks like the link of a chain) and type in the URL of the web page you want to link to. Remember that for the link to work the address must be correct.
• Include a mailto link on your page. You can do this by inserting the following html code:
  <A HREF="mailto:sentantaro@jaist.ac.jp">sentantaro@jaist.ac.jp</A>
  It will look like this: sentantaro@jaist.ac.jp
• If you have many links on your page, group them under themes or concepts and link them to another page. This makes navigation easier for visitors.
• Make sure that all your links are active.

Images

• To insert an image, click on the insert images icon (it looks like a small rectangle) You will have to type in the image's filename. You may use either GIF files or JPEG files.
• Keep images to a reasonable size, remember that big images take a long t ime to download.

Design

• Put the date of the last update of your page.
• Use the following page to check for errors in your page:
  http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/
• You can copy icons (buttons, arrows etc) for your web page from the following site:
  http://www.htmlgoodies.com/images.html
  Use the 'Save Image As' command of Netscape by holding the curser down over the image while at the same time clicking the right side button of the mouse with Windows or by holding down the mouse button until the menu comes up on a Macintosh.
  Remember to click the 'save' icon (it lools like a floppy disc) in order to save changes to your page.