How to Build a Mini Website

A large collection of mini trucks are owned by young men who love to customize their trucks and show them off at car shows and race tracks around the country. Paint, suspension, engine, and body modifications are all completed on many small trucks so that they become one-of-a-kind creations that everyone loves to look at. To give people a place to go to see what mini trucks are all about, you can build a mini web site for free using Yahoo Geocities (geocities.yahoo.com).

Things You'll Need

• Computer
• Internet
• Pictures
• Links
• News

Instructions

1. Create a unique Yahoo e-mail account at mail.yahoo.com. Click on the Sign Up button to create a new user ID. Think of a user ID with the word "mini" (TRUMINICKS, MINISTICK) in it so you can promote the information to mini truck owners and associate your information with mini truck enthusiasts. Confirm the creation of your new e-mail account by visiting your Yahoo inbox.

2. Visit the Yahoo Geocities home page at geocities.yahoo.com. Click on the Sign Up button under "Get a Site for Free." Answer the two questions about what type of web site you plan on building and how you heard about Geocities. Continue by entering the security code and then click Submit. Save your user ID and URL address for future reference. After you receive confirmation of your account's creation, click on Build Your Website Now.

3. Search the Geocities Control Panel to learn about new things that allow you to build a mini web site. Inside the web site editor is where you will be placing the information that will be shown on the web site. To begin editing the site click on Create a Web Site. You might have to confirm your new mini user ID and password to be brought to the control panel where the Yahoo web site editor has its tools located. Make a choice of "Try PageWizards" or "Try PageBuilder" using their link. Click on Try PageBuilder to build a free unique web site and click on Try PageWizards for a template web site that has the text and images formatted. Both of these options take you to a web site editor.

4. Upload images of mini trucks you own and have taken the images of from your computer. Uploading your own pictures ensures that you are not using someone else's pictures, which you do not want to do. Insert text boxes with your news. Use links by typing out a word and then highlighting it. Click on the LINK button and a box will appear where you can enter the URL address to the location. Here you can add a Screen Tip, which will show the text when the mouse is over it. Using these tags helps you rank high on search engines. Using tags when you upload a picture to the web site is important as well.

5. Build a well constructed mini web site that includes the right page titles, links from one page to the next and then home again, and a nice design that people will like to visit. Go to car shows and take lots of pictures. Feature them on the home page and change them weekly. Update your news regularly by saving copies of old home pages in an archive. Just copy and paste the entire page onto a new page and save the copy. Link to it from a site map page and the search engines will love to rank your site high.

Tips & Warnings

• Use a navigation bar on each page to allow visitors to move around the site easily. You can list Home Contact News Photos with a link to go to each place quickly. Consider the number 1.62 when designing the layout of a page. Multiply the page width by that number to find the size of the field that would fit well inside the page. A little odd, but the results are taught by the best design studios as a way to keep people pleased by a web site's design.

• COPYRIGHT! Do not use other people's images or words exactly. Copyright material is always plainly listed and in order to avoid a problem, list only your own images and ideas. Use links to let others see the information posted by others to avoid copyright infringement.

Resources

• Geocities Home Page