Your web questions answered

Send your WebWorld queries to webworld@ irishtimes.ie or by post to William Hederman, The Irish Times, D'Olier Street, Dublin 2.

If I create my own website, where can I have it hosted for free? - Mark Colgan, Dublin

Whether you want to create an online photo album or set up the next Amazon.com, there are several companies offering free web space, along with advice and assistance in building your site. What they demand in return is the right to place adverts on your pages.

GeoCities (www.geocities.com), owned by Yahoo!, is probably the best-known of these companies, hosting literally millions of individuals' sites. They will allow you up to 11 megabytes of server space for free, and to help you promote your site they will incorporate it into one of their "neighbourhoods", or virtual publishing communities, which means it will be listed alongside sites with similar interests.

If you already have web pages, say on your school's website, and you want to move them, you can transfer them to GeoCities using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), which is explained at the site. Other sites offering varying amounts of free space and help for beginners include Tripod (www.tripod.com), Escalix (www.escalix.com), FreeServers (www.freeservers.com) and Virtual Avenue (www.virtualave.net).

You wrote last week about school web site builders who had taught themselves HTML. Can I not just use a web design programme? - Fergal Moran, Co Meath

Yes, you can create your pages and even establish and maintain your own site using a software package such as HomeSite, Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Even Microsoft Word allows you to convert a document into HTML by choosing the "Save as HTML" option.

But you will have much more flexibility and freedom in what you do if you know at least the basics of how HTML works. It makes it easier to fix small problems that arise and means you can do certain special effects which aren't possible with these programmes.

Once you have the basics, one of the best ways to develop your HTML knowledge is to browse the web and regularly "View Source" under the View menu on your browser, especially when you see something you like. This displays the HTML which lies behind the page. The Web is a very transparent medium: no publisher can hide the code in web pages.

Several people e-mailed asking me to point them to more sites with advice and resources relating to website building, so here goes: Learn the Net (www.learnthenet.com), Builder.com (www.builder.com), HTML Center (www.htmlcenter. com) and HTML - An Interactive Tutorial (www.davesite.com/webstation).