How to create a one page personal web page using Microsoft Publisher

How to Create a One-Page Personal Web Page

You don't need to be a hot dog html programmer to create your own personal "vanity" page. You can do it with a number of Microsoft's products (just don't use Front Page unless you know your web host supports it).

For this example, we'll use Microsoft Office Publisher 2003, but we could use Word, Excel, Visio, or PowerPoint. Most versions of these tools will produce html code for you.

Some of the Microsoft products are terribly wasteful when converting to html code, creating more code than is necessary. But if you are only creating a simple one-page screen, it probably won't matter. For complicated pages, you would be better served by learning html coding or acquiring and learning a web-specific tool such as Dreamweaver (expensive overkill unless you're a web professional).

Okay, let's get our fingers dirty. Create a new folder for your project. You'll put the final version of your page plus the final versions of your pictures and graphics that you want to include on your personal web page into this folder.

As you launch Publisher, it will show you a New Publications bar.

From the bar, click on Web Sites and E-mail, then click on Web Sites, then Easy Web Site Builder.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

It should look something like figure 1 (click on the picture to enlarge it in another window).

In "site Goals", figure 2, just click on "cancel". Don't choose any options.

Now you can fiddle with the layout and pictures as you wish. The rest of this lesson refers to figure 3.

Since you only have one page, you can get rid of the "home" link on the left. It's called a Navigation Bar and you don't need it. So right click on it and choose the "delete" option.

Using the bar on the left, you can change the basic look using the

Page Content
Publication Design
Color Schemes
Font Schemes
options

You can resize the boxes that contain information by clicking on them and dragging the circular "handles".

Change text and pictures as you wish (like putting your own picture in place of the logo in the upper left corner, then changing the title information to your name and such).

If you're familiar with Publisher, you can do all the things it is capable of including inserting and altering text and picture boxes and such. One thing you can't do is use more than the font you select in your font scheme, since the average browser doesn't support very many fonts. The really fancy fonts you see on some of the websites have been converted to pictures and included as such. You can do the same thing using a graphics editor.

A few Do's and Don'ts:

Do convert pictures to 72 dpi density. That's what the browsers use. Anything else is wasted.

Don't use big pictures or graphics unless you don't mind slowing down the load time for your visitors. Remember, some of them might still be stuck with dial-up.

Do reduce the size of the picture or graphic to it's "display" size using your graphics editor BEFORE you include it on your page. Just because you stuffed a big picture into a small box hasn't reduced the actual size of the picture and the amount of time it will take to download. As an example, the thumbnail figure pictures allow this page to load in 10 seconds for a dial-up connection. If we'd used larger pictures, the load time would have been much greater.

Don't include too much personal information. There are sharks swimming in the Internet pool. Don't make it easy for them to victimize you.

Saving the file:

Click on File in the top bar, then "Save As"

Choose "Web Page (*.htm;*.html)" from the "save as type" drop down menu.

Give the page a name. Use "index.htm" or "index.html" unless you will be included in the middle of someone else's website, then ask your host for advice.

Click the "Save" button.

Now bundle up all your optimized pictures and your index file and send them to whoever is going to upload (FTP) them to your web page.

Congratulations! You're done.