It's good to visit lots of websites to get ideas about what you love or hate to see, and also inspiration about subject matter and how people have organized their webspace. Some of the good websites can be found easily by following a Webring. There are rings on many topics: original midis, HTML Writers, Notepad HTML writers, Paint Shop Pro Users, Web Weavers, and on and on. There's a Canadian webring, too. Here's a link to get you to some Roses Webrings. Just type in a keyword and go.

Pesky little things:
It is possible to underline words on your page using the command u. But try to avoid it, because your visitors think that underlining means a link and they'll get annoyed when it isn't a link.

It is possible to make words on the page blink if you use that command in brackets just before the word you want to have blinking. But the blink command works only with Netscape. Explorer ignores it.

To put a horizontal line across the page use the command hr. "Horizontal Rule." To make the line shorter, try this command hr width=50%.

It's good to know that although there are a truckload of HTML commands, you don't have to know them all to build your webpage. You can be learning new ones as you go along.

Except for what I found on the Net, the only book I read was a little paperback by Elizabeth Castro, HTML for the World Wide Web published by Peachpit Press. It's a visual quickstart guide.

A bulletin board of wonderful people who helped me when I started HTML is at Third Age here. They were great about answering all my dumb questions. (I am "chuckles.")

Also, find a very active and advanced HTML bulletin board at Delphi.

Tips To Speed Up Your Page Load Time

Things that slow down your page:

Large graphics (photos)
A lot of graphics
Midis
Anything that has to link to another website
Background Designs

Ways to speed up your load time:

Scan your photos at a lower DPI, say 72 instead of 300
Scan your photos smaller, say 50% instead of 100%
Convert your photos to .jpg, rather than .bmp or .gif
Put fewer photos on each page (use several pages)
Choose plain background color instead of pattern
Select shorter music (eg. 2 min instead of 4)

Another Trick

Sometimes you can put something on the top of your page
that loads instantly and gives the viewer something to
look at while the rest of the page is loading further down.
For example, text loads fast, but large images load slow.
A rearrangement of page might make the loading "seem" faster.

How long does your page take?

If you want to know how long your page takes to load,
don't just check in your own computer. Your page is stored
in your browser's cache so will load faster. Try clearing
out your cache or viewing your page with a different browser
or check your page on somebody else's computer. That will
show you how long your load time really IS. Then you can
decide what, if anything, you want to change on your page.

Adding Music

There are several ways to put music on a page, depending on whether you want the music hidden or not and whether you want the visitor to be able to click to start the music, but have it be quiet if he wants. Here's the easiest way:

a href="music.mid"
(Don't forget this is inside <>)

Music
/a (inside <>)

With this method the visitor clicks on "Music" to start the music.

If you want the music hidden (background), this is one code that works (inside <>):

EMBED SRC="music.mid" hidden AUTOSTART="true" LOOP="2"

A lot of people hate embedded (hidden) music, especially if you specify too many loops (times it will play)

This code will allow a window to show the MIDI so people can shut it off if they want:(in <>)

EMBED SRC="music.mid" AUTOSTART="true" LOOP="1" WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="50" CONTROLS="Console"

You can change the size of the console, but try these and see how they look and work.

OK, back to class.