Creating a Website: 1

I fell in love with the Web just about as soon as we first met. That was when I was beginning to study for my MTh in Applied Theology at what was then Westminster College, Oxford (now the Oxford Brookes University's Institute of Education). We were inducted into the Computing Room in the library - I suppose it's now called the Resources Centre, or some such - and allowed to have a go accessing the Web through the machines there. It was pretty slow, as I remember. They didn't have broadband back then, and my imagination and experience of what to look for were limited. But it was enough, for me to be smitten, hooked. I couldn't wait to get Internet access on my home computer, and this must have happened that autumn (1996?). My first attempt was with Compuserve; I later subscribed to AOL for a short time (yes, I know, this really is confessions time) but none of this counted for real, until I moved to a 'proper' ISP. At first this was Virgin, but later I went over to Freeserve, and in spite of some vicissitudes, that's where I've stayed through my subsequent Internet career.

It wasn't long before surfing wasn't enough: I wanted to create my own web presence. Something about that urge to write and see my own words in print, published. I always wanted this in the days of hard copy print media: now cyberspace beckoned. Everyone could be their own writer and publisher.

At first I wanted to produce a website for the church. This idea simmered for months. The easy thing would have been to delegate it, or find someone who knew something about it, who would do it for us. (Well, I say this would have been the easy thing, but I'm not too sure who I would have got to do it...)

What stopped me from doing the easy thing? That's simple: I really wanted to do it myself, to learn how it was done and to have control of it all myself. After all, I was probably the person who was going to have the most input, and if I wasn't doing it all myself, I would need to tell whoever was doing it, what to write.

My first attempts were with my favourite word processor, which at that time happened to be Lotus WordPro. I still think it's pretty cool - plus it ain't Microsoft. I set out the pages like pages of a magazine or other desktop publishing venture, then used the 'Export as a webpage' option. Then I found a shareware FTP programme recommended by my ISP, called Terrapin, to launch the pages into cyberspace. Which is just about what it felt like I was doing. And hey, it worked!

This was all OK for a time, but it wasn't too long before WordPro started doing some peculiar things. When I edited an existing page and saved it, it used to create files for any internally linked pages. Only trouble was, where these pages already existed, it overwrote the existing ones with brand new (and therefore empty) pages. I never did find out why this happened, or what I was doing wrong. But it convinced me that I wasn't going to rely on word processors: I needed to learn HTML and how it worked.

I've always been a great believer in reading the manual - I was the member of the family who plodded through the books when everyone else was learning by playing with the machine. My approach didn't pay off in the short term, but heck, I ended up knowing much more about how things worked than everyone else. I may sound like a Puritan, but virtue does still have some rewards. So naturally, I bought a book, and the first one I used was Rob Young's Introducing Web Design. It's a pretty good beginning, though for a more complete reference I recommend HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy. In fact, just about anything published by O'Reilly is likely to be good.

With a few classic moments of trial and error, learning by making mistakes, and eventually getting the hang of more and more of it; also using other tools like

I gradually got the hang of it, and learned to love the Web even more. This website, Living To Tell The Tale, is the latest and ongoing fruit.