First things first:

• Choose an image you want to use.
• Position your mouse over the graphic of your choice.
• Right click and choose "save image/picture as". Save the graphic to your hard drive. I like making a file folder for images in My Documents Folder. Give the image you are saving a name you will remember. (Saving a background works the same way, except you need to right click on the background far enough away from any other images so as not to corn-fuse the poor little guy.  ??? Why, your mouse, of course!)
• NOW - Get ready to have some FUN!

• On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Compose tab.
  
• In the Stationery area, click Create New.
  
• In a new message window, click the View menu, click Source Edit, and then click the Source tab to make changes.
  
• When creating your stationery, try to keep the file size smaller than 10 KB. Pictures and other objects can make the file too large to be easily downloaded. (Check the size of your stationery inside the Stationery folder at \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery.)
  
• To apply stationary to all your outgoing messages, click the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Compose tab. In the Stationary area, select the Mail and/or News check box, and then click Select.
  
• To apply stationary to an individual message, click the Message menu, point to New Message Using, and then select a stationary.
  
• To apply or change stationary after you start a message, click the Format menu, point to Apply Stationary, and then select a stationary.

• Open Netscape Navigator
  
• From the Edit menu - choose Preferences.
  
• After opening the Preferences dialog, use the list on the left to open the Mail - News Groups menu. Use the dialog box to change Formatting.
  
• Turn ON the "Use the HTML editor to compose messages" option. Now you should be able to write your e-mail in HTML format, using backgrounds, graphics and "links". Turn ON the "Send the message in plain text and HTML" option.

The person who receives your e-mail will be able to see the HTML format, providing the browser they use has the capability necessary. Some browsers (AOL, and probably others) cannot "see" the graphics or links, so it is important to leave this dialog ON. People who can't see your stationary will receive a plain text message, usually with the graphic as an attached file.

From here on, I'm going to assume (however unwise that may be) that you have used the Netscape Messenger to compose e-mail, have read the Help file, and at least have a basic knowledge of the program. If my assumption is incorrect, maybe you should consider backing up and crawling through that process before you try running with this idea. In Mailbox, choose NEW MESSAGE from the file menu. The COMPOSITION window will appear.

If you wish to use a simple "one graphic" format. . . click on "INSERT OBJECT". This can be accomplished either on the "INSERT" file menu or by clicking the OBJECT Icon on the toolbar. Choose "IMAGE" and follow the instructions in the dialog box that will appear. You will need to look for the graphic you have saved to your hard drive, open it and apply it to your message. You can add several images to one message this way, positioning them where you want them to appear in your text, via the Image dialog box.  Just keep in mind the first rule of good 'Net Design: You have 30 seconds to capture your reader's attention, after that you lose 'em.  Load time is critical, even in e-mail!

If you wish to use a "Background" and write your message over it, choose FORMAT on the file menu. Open the "PAGE COLORS AND PROPERTIES" dialog box. Click on USE IMAGE, and choose the background you have saved to your hard drive, open it and apply it to your message. You can now type your e-mail message, and insert images on the background if you choose. It is possible to include Horizontal Lines, Links, and tables in your e-mail using the INSERT OBJECT command.
I suggest you experiment until you get "stationary" you like, then SAVE it as a TEMPLATE, to be used again and again. Truly, the process is so simple, you can design new "stationary" for every occasion.  Have FUN!!

Tips:

To use stationery you see in a message from someone else, select the message, and then on the File menu, click Save as Stationery. A stationery file is an HTML file and can be edited in Outlook Express.

If you want to get very, very creative with your Stationery and don't mind spending a few $$ look into Scrippy at www.scrippy.com

Wallpaper for your PC

It is possible, as I'm sure you know, to save any graphic you find on the 'net as Windows Wallpaper. All you have to do is position your mouse (cute little guy, isn't he?) over the image, right click and choose SAVE AS WALLPAPER. This will work with most backgrounds and any .gif or .jpg image. Windows turns the files into Bitmap Format and stores them in the Windows directory. So... a word of warning here. Don't think, just because you've saved a graphic as wallpaper, you've GOT IT to use in your e-mail or on your Home Page OK? You will need to save the graphic in both formats, 'cause you cannot "see" Windows Bitmap Images in an HTML document.

- over codetouch the button

to accomplish the button's mouse-over action:
cut and paste the following java script into the document <head>

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0
var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i<a.length&&(x=a[i])&&x.oSrc;i++) x.src=x.oSrc;
}

function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0
var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array();
var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)
if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}}
}

function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v3.0
var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n];
for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i]Document); return x;
}

function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0
var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3)
if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];}
}
//-->
</script>

then cut and paste the following HTML code in the document <body>
where you wish to have the action take place
changing the image names to the button name you have chosen to use and point to your link

<a href="../studio-how2.htm" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore()" onMouseOver="MM_swapImage('dot','','dot1blue.gif',1)"><img name="dot" border="0" src="dot2blue.gif" width="27" height="25" align="top"></a>

mouse over the dot to return to the buttons & backgrounds page

Make your own
Personal Home Page
using Graphics from Nana Ellen's Studio

Now, I don't know about you.... but when I was a girl, it didn't take me too long to figure out that if there was something I wanted done, and I wasn't exactly sure how to go about it, the most effective way to accomplish it was just "let Nana do it."

Well, that's more or less the method we're working with here. If you've always wanted a Home Page of your very own, but you don't have the time, the inclination, or the know how to accomplish the job yourself.... why not just "let Nana do it"? Here's how it works:

What you will need:

An ISP (Internet Service Provider) to give you access to the WWW (World Wide Web) via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). You already have one, or you wouldn't be reading this, right? :o)

Web Site Space Your ISP can "give" you Home Page space. AOL, for example, offers 2 megabytes of space per screen name to their clients and you don't HAVE to use the AD laden Hometown option either. You can purchase space (usually in increments of 10 MB or so) along with your Internet Access and E-mail Account. Pricing varies, but shop around, competition is vigorous and you should be able to find service for your Home Page at a very reasonable figure.

Don't fall victim to "something for nothing" thinking here. Oh sure, Geocities, Yahoo, and numerous others offer FREE Web Site space. Just remember Nana said, "you get what you pay for". Well, to be more accurate, you get to spend hours and hours of your time building a Web Site only to put it in Free Space and have it covered up, cluttered up, overwhelmed, and inundated with ads... totally tasteless, vastly annoying, uncontrollable.. ads! Don't you think something worth spending so much time doing is worth doing right? On the other hand, sites such as c|net offer a Quick Site Builder (no banner ads or popups on your site) for less than the price of a soda per day. Check around carefully before deciding where you will *put* your Web Site. Most serious surfers despise all those banner ads and popup windows. Don't you?

Plenty of time and More than Enough Patience! Also, more than enough RAM on you 'puter is a very good idea! Running an HTML Editor, your other favorite browser and a graphic program or two eats up gigs faster than kids in cream pie.

A PC Web Design Program - following are links to some good ones:

Beginner:
cuteHTML
Coffee Cup HTML Editor
Arachnophilia

Professional:
Dreamweaver
GoLive

File Transfer Protocol Program:
cuteFTP
WS_FTP
LeapFTP

Graphic Design Program:
Paint Shop Pro
LView Pro
Pixia - Very Cool Program - FREE Download

What to do:

Pick out a graphic collection from my studio (or from one of the other graphic sites around the WWW which offer complete sets - i.e. background, buttons, e-mail icon, etc.). When you've settled on the set you want for your Home Page -- Make a new folder on your hard drive to hold all of the files for your Home Page Click on SAVE AS in the File Menu of you Browser. Now save the entire web page to your hard drive with either .html or .htm as the file extension (homepage.html -- index.html -- mypage.htm).

Open your PC Web Design Program. Mouse around in the program for awhile and get familiar with what it does and where things are. Please, remember the Help files are included with the program for a reason. If you get stuck the people who wrote the program probably put the answer to your questions in there somewhere.

Click on OPEN in the File Menu. Find the folder where you stored the .html file you just saved, select and open it. If all went according to plan you should see the same page you copied from the 'net - background, buttons and everything.

So now you have the "bones" for your Home Page - ready made!

Where to go from there?

Well.... here are a few basic things to remember when doing a Home Page

First, you want people to visit your page. That means it has to be tastefully designed, and it has to LOAD quickly. Taste is, of course, relative. Each of us have certain likes and dislikes, favorites and pet peeves... Since this is YOUR Home Page - your taste is what counts. A sure recipe for failure is: try to please everyone, all the time.

LOAD time, however, is not relative. Not on the 'net - where there are literally millions of pages, many of which are at least as good and some that are BETTER than yours. Take it as a lesson in life from your virtual grandmother... it won't matter how GOOD your content is.... people won't hang around and wait 5 minutes for a page to load! There are a couple of ways around that problem.

Keep your graphics and photos small. An interesting background graphic can be as small as 1K. The background on this page is 18 pixels wide, 6 pixels high and weighs in at under 1K, adding one second of load time. The table background, shown right, is 81x92 pixels, weighs 2K and adds 2 seconds to the overall page load. The multicolor bar used throughout this page is a 3K .jpg file!
A neat trick is to use a single graphic sized as lines (resized from 372x36 pixels to 75% of the page width by 5 pixels)

AND buttons (resized to 12x12 pixels because no matter how it appears it only loads ONCE! Result... every line and button you see on this page loaded in 3 seconds over a medium speed Internet connection.

If you have a whole bunch of stuff you want to put on your Home Page - break it up into smaller documents and link them all together like the pros do. Remember, animated graphics take a long time to load -- and more than two or three of them on one page can "crash" a browser altogether. Your quests won't enjoy having your site "crash" their browser.

Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but on the 'Net it can become "copyright infringement" in a heartbeat! Be sure to give credit where credit is due for the stuff you borrow for your pages; i.e. graphics, midi files, animation, Java or cgi scripts, html and so on. Proper 'Netiquette dictates a "link" back to the site where you borrowed your stuff. Don't put yourself in the embarrassing position of being asked to "return" something you thought nobody would mind if you took without asking. I think we all remember that lesson from childhood. Right?

Speaking of 'Netiquette'... How many times, in your search for stuff to embellish your Home Page, have you found something you wanted to use only to discover "Right Click" had been disabled? Do you realize that particular bit of script represents nothing but a challenge to break in and take something for many surfers? Following are a couple of quotes from a very popular and well respected Tech Newsletter, which shall remain nameless here:

"Any time I run into one of those anti-right click 'protections,' I put the site in my restricted zone - leaving the JavaScript used to trap the button disabled. I can then right-click away without issue. This won't work on a couple of sites that use JavaScript to actually do something useful, but those are in the minority. The lion's share of sites with right-click trapping scripts are usually done by hacks who borrowed the code from somebody else, so the scripts on their pages are never of significance."

"I always laugh aloud when I see Web pages with right-click warnings on them. "Oh no! I can't copy your stupid image!" Now, I'm not saying that all images are stupid, nor am I saying that users don't have the right to hold all rights over their properties. However, if you put it on the Internet, it's pretty much fair game. If you don't want people to steal it, don't put it there. Simple, and very effective. The other day, someone sent me a link to a shareware utility that would allegedly put the kybosh on all Web content stealing activities. Bah. Whatever. We've discussed how you can use SHIFT+F10 or the "context menu" button on your keyboard to bypass blocking before. Here's another possible route (at least, for images): left click to select and hold it, tap Windows+D to bring up your desktop, then drop the object anywhere. Failing that, you could also try viewing the source for the Web page to find the direct URL for the image. Where there's a will, there's a way. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security when you try to "block that kick."

A grandmotherly take on this approach to "blocked right click" would be; however ineffective the script may be, however simple it might be to work around it and take the item in question... does it mean nothing to you that the creator/owner would rather not share their stuff, and is asking visitors to respect their wishes? I wonder... have we moved so far away from common courtesy and respect for others that we feel free to "loot" anything that catches our fancy just because we can?

If you have a passion for fancy fonts - join FA (fontaholics anonymous) - but don't try to show off your entire collection on your Home Page. Pick one or two fonts and stick with them throughout. And don't forget -- it don't matter what your page looks like on your 'puter -- if the fellow looking at it doesn't have the font you chose in their collection they won't be able to see it! What they will see is their own default font (probably New Times Roman or something similar) in their browser. BORING!!! A good rule of thumb is to stick with basic Windows Fonts. That way, anyone who looks at your pages stands a pretty good chance of seeing them the way you intended.

For what it's worth... by the time I understood about using Windows Fonts to design web pages I had installed about 500 additional fonts in my 'puter and ended up buying a 25 pound book of Windows 98 Secrets, at least partially to find out which fonts came with the OS. Just to save you the aggravation - here's a list of fonts that come with Windows 98SE:

NOTE: one of these days I may find time to update all of this to Windows XP, but for now it's safe to assume that if Win9x had a font XP probably will too.

To see what fonts you currently have installed, click the Start button on the Taskbar, point to settings, and then click Control Panel. Click the Fonts folder icon to display the Fonts folder window. All of the fonts that come with Windows 98 are stored in the \Windows\Fonts folder. I recently downloaded a nifty little freeware program X-Fonter 3.6 that manages all of my fonts at once. Very useful for the devout fontaholic.

If you are using a dark graphic for your background with light text, unless you make the underlying page a dark color, your guests will not be able to "see" anything until the entire page is loaded. White text on a white page!!! A better idea is to pick a dark background color, similar to your background graphic. (Vice Versa, if you use a light background graphic and dark text.) That way the text will show up and your visitors can start to read while the graphics are loading. Keeps 'em around a little longer than waiting for a blank screen to fill up. Nowadays everybody's in a rush.

With those little tidbits out of the way.... you can begin to WRITE your Home Page

If you've chosen a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get)! It couldn't be more simple. If you have ever worked with a word processing program you can work with one of these. Simply open (if you haven't already) the .html file you saved from Nana's ?? Click Here if you missed that bit?? position your cursor over the existing text and begin replacing it with your own content. But please, remember to use your Spell Checker before you publish your pages. That's one of my pet peeves! Indulge Nana, won't you?

That's it!!

There are comprehensive instructions for publishing your work included with any good program. If you run into trouble the Tech Support Staff at your ISP should be able to help you. If you run into questions regarding the HTML portion of your project I recommend "HTML for dummies". What else?
They are online at http://www.lanw.com/html4dum/
Or, you can run a search for HTML tutorials and find all sort of useful and interesting (or not!) information.

Try these links first:

Lissa Explains it ALL!

Webmonkey for KIDS

Also, I suppose this information should come with a "warning" of some sort. As anyone who loves their 'puter and has started their own Home Page will tell you - "This is an addictive substance!" You can set down for a few minutes and get up 4 or 5 hours later, without a clue how much time you've spent. You can irritate your family, get calluses on your typing fingers and your backside, and neglect your duties in general. On the up side, you can meet some truly wonderful people, accomplish something you are pleased with and proud of and just Have FUN in general. So what are you waiting for? "let Nana do the graphics" and get cracking!

Hugs and cookies,
Nana Ellen

It seldom occurs to teenagers that someday
they will know as little as their parents.
Young people will eventually learn that
many great truths are spoken through false teeth.
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