Look at me! I'm on the Internet...no, I swear I made this...
Written: Nov 01 '01
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The Bottom Line
The best web page builder on the web, especially for the beginner who's just looking to have some fun with it.
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| Full Review |
I have just recently posted an almost-finished site using a combination of Yahoo! Geocities as well as Microsoft Front Page. Overall, I am happy with the outcome, especially because of my limited knowledge of HTML, or any other program language for that matter.
Sign Up
To sign up for a geocities account, you simply go to www.geocities.com and fill out a few simple questions. The most difficult part of this process was choosing my user name. (the name "pelirojo18" was aparently already in use!)
Once you sign up, you are ready to start making your page, which will appear at the address: www.geocities.com/username.html
Beginner's Tools
Being the ultimate beginner, with the exception of my commission work with a web-designer, and not knowing much of programing language, I decided to use the tools provided by Geocities.
Tools to get started
Of course you can start completely from scratch and design the entire page with HTML, but Geocities starts you out with a large group of templates to use as your background. These come in a wide variety of topics and categories, and cover all but the most specific of topics. Personally, although I found a large number of choices, I did not find many of these ideas useful.
Here are some of the template choices...
Advice column
Baby page
Celebrity Fan
Financial
Party Invitation
Pet page
Personal page
Support Group
and many many more...
Once you select a background, you can use the Yahoo Page Wizard or the Page Builder.
The Page Wizard
This option allows you to answer some general questions about your site, and based on those answers, Yahoo Geocities will design the page for you. I have limited knowledge of this aspect of Geocities, but third-party comments from others have led me to believe that your options are severely limited with the Page Wizard. The advantage may be that the setup is easy and quick, but for the user with even small customization needs, I do not recommend using this feature.
The Page Builder
This option allows much more customization, but is sometimes confusing and difficult to deal with. When you choose to use the Page Builder, you get a toolbar that has such features as:
Text box
Create Hyperlink
Header/Footer
Add picture
Font face/size/style/etc...
The advantage to this program is the available customization, but when I used it, I had a few recurring problems. Often, the text boxes, links, etc. would overlap creating confusion and disaray on the page. The font colors and other formatting features are nice, but I continued to face problems with aligning the page correctly.
Now that I have made my site, what can I add to it?
Yahoo has a few nice features that add to your site and are very easy to incorporate. Here is a small list of the most popular:
Counters
Guestbook (available for customization)
Headlines
Weather
Maps
Calendars
Yahoo automatically generates the HTML code for you so you simply copy and paste into the page where you want these features to appear.
More Advanced Features
File Manager and site statistics: You can keep track of each page in your site and how many page views it gets, as well as where the people come from and what type of internet browser they use.
Upload and FTP: You are allowed to upload up to 5 items or 5 MB at one time. (For reference, the free account gives you 15 MB, which can always be upgraded for a small fee) This feature works incredibly well with Microsoft Front Page, as does Geocities as a whole.
Let me say here that I strongly recommend you use Microsoft Front Page because it allows exponentially more customization and features and is very compatible with this program
Site Incorporation
Yahoo Geocities allows you to, with a few clicks, list your site in a variety of categories in the Geocities search engine. The best feature of this aspect is that if your site has multiple pages, you can list each page in a different category to increase site hits. (this feature was especially handy for my site {feel free to stop by})
The other incorporation feature is search engine submission. Now, Yahoo does not automatically submit your site, but it has a meta-tag generator to help you in the process. This is the only knock I have against this site, and the problem could very well be on my end. I have had trouble with getting this feature to work, and because I am not the world's most computer-literate person, I do not know how to fix the problem.
This review is FINALLY over
I strongly recommend Geocities for all the above reasons and because it is the best in its class in my opinion. Nowhere else do you get the memory, features, and other amenities associated with Yahoo.
A must use!
~Thanks
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
pelirojo18
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Member: Justin Balthrop
Location: Mesquite, Texas
Reviews written: 130
Trusted by: 86 members
About Me:
TONS OF STUFF ADDED TO MY COLLEGE SECTION ON MY WEBSITE....GO NOW!!!!!!
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