Web Publishing: Weaving Your Own Web Site

Till last year, if you weren't someone.something.com , you were perhaps still somebody. Today, if you don't have an Internet address, you are nobody. The Web address has become more of a business necessity than just a prestige issue for organisations. Corporate houses are looking at the World Wide Web as another medium for advertising their presence.

For institutions and public sector organisations, it is a new mode of disseminating information about themselves. For individuals, it is a meeting point. It's time to take a look at how you make yourself present on the Web. Not as a viewer or browser, but as a publisher.

Need for a Web Page

Sensing the urge of the companies to be present on the Web, over the past two years, a new breed of Web service providers have come up. These "publishers" offer corporate houses the facility for putting up pages on the Web. While they are still a small number, countable on a few fingers, they indicate a trend among businesses of regarding the Web as an advertisement medium, at the very least.

For public sector and nonprofit organisations, the Web represents a medium to disseminate information about themselves. And for newspapers and magazines, the Web is yet another medium of expression.

Quite many reasons for you, as a private individual or if you own a business--even a small office/home office--or for your corporation, to think of venturing onto the Web.

Once the decision is made, you need to consider about the infrastructure and tools required for putting up a home page on the Web.

Ways and Means

To become part of the World Wide Web, you could either set up a Web page yourself, or let your company's IS team handle it, or outsource the job to a Web service provider. While the decision to set up a site (or page) on the Web could be a business decision, designing a page is not. For that you need application development skills, a good eye for design, and most importantly, a good idea of what it is you want your site to convey.

If it is to be a personal home page, all you may need to post could be information about yourself, photographs of your family, and so on. For instance, a fruit-seller from Singapore has a home page on the Web, which gives the advantages of eating jackfruits, the price of jackfruit, et al.

This is a project that you could handle with your word-processor, if it has a Web publishing module as an add-on. Microsoft Corp.'s Word 7 for Windows 95, Word Pro 96 and Corel WordPerfect 7 are some packages that provide Web publishing modules as add-ons. Their advantages are that they are simple to learn. Finally, they are familiar to work with, since the toolbars and menus are identical.

Using the word-processor, you can create pages that include text, graphics, similar to the documents (reports, presentations) you would create in the ordinary way. These conversion utilities do well for lengthy documents that are primarily text, for inserting drafts, or for preexisting text documents.

Certainly the use of a conversion tool makes a rational step in handling long text documents. But these conversion tools do not necessarily get the job done completely, and additional HTML editing may be necessary. About the HTML editing or authoring tool, a little later.