Who, What, Where, Why, When, How...

By Doug Bills
Thursday, January 17, 2002

Who?

Just to let you know that you've come to the right place, we are the Bills family of Christchurch, New Zealand. You can read about us as a family or as individuals - Doug, Cathie, Jenna, Ashleigh and Shannon.

What?

This site is simply a family information site. I might also add my CV on the site so that businesses can find out about my qualifications, experience and accomplishments.

Where?

As mentioned above, our home is in Christchurch, New Zealand... which is also the home of the mighty Canterbury Crusaders Rugby Team... Yay. This site is situated on the servers of Netaccess which is also my ISP.

Why?

We have various friends and relations scattered throughout the world and this site is a way of helping us communicate with each other. We also communicate by other means (email, chat, phone...) but this site is a convenient way for people to read about us when it is convenient to them. Also, I can display some of the photos taken on our digital camera which is always fun.

When?

I started this site on 17^th January 2002. I hope to update it regularly - at least once a week in order to fulfill it's purpose (see Why? above) and to get you to come back regularly to see what's new :-) No doubt the rest of the family will update their pages too when I show them how easy it is to use CityDesk (see side-bar).

How?

This is a simple site consisting of just text files. As such, it would be relatively easy for you to set up a site of your own. Why not have a go? Soon I will write an article showing you all the steps but, for now, here's very briefly what you need to do:

HTML editor
You need to have some way of creating your pages. You could use a simple text editor (such as Windows Notepad) but then you will need to know HTML very well. A better idea for the beginner is a WYSIWYG editor. Microsoft Front Page is very popular but if you want to start off with a free editor, you could use CityDesk (see side-bar).
Site Host
After you've created your masterpiece, you need to put it on the internet so people can go and view it. This just means that you put your files on the hard drive of a computer that is permanently connected to the internet. This computer (or the organisation that owns it) is called your site host. To get the best deal for you, you should try your ISP first as they could very well provide some space on their network for you for free.
FTP
Now how are you going to get it there? You need to send the files using FTP. There are heaps of FTP programs out there but if you use CityDesk, this will be taken care of without any other program required.

Doug Bills is founder of AI Environments - a company developing environments having Artificial Intelligence.

This site was developed using CityDesk. I'm not going to explain how to use the program here - you can follow this link to download it and find that out for yourself.

What I will say about CityDesk though is that I thoroughly recommend it for the beginner or casual Web page designer. It doesn't have all the advanced technical stuff that the larger applications have, but this is one of it's strengths - it is very easy for a beginner to learn and use... and besides - it's free so it's gotta be good for ya :-)

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