I have looked on Internet for a web page editor that is free, easy to use, requires no knowledge of HTML, and is full-featured. While free editors have been made, many are of poor quality. One editor I found had nothing more than "stone aged" features - except for ad it places at bottom of each page telling your visitors that they can make their pages look just as bad for free.

By far, best editor I found is "Selida." You can download it at http://www.amaryllis.8m.com and click "download." Note: Selida is a rather large file. If you have a dial-up connection, it can take over an hour to download. With an effective program I found called "Download Accelerator," I was able to download it in 15 minutes. Check it out at www.speedbit.com.

Selida

Selida also comes with some very useful templates. If you find a template you like, simply edit it, save it, and you've finished a web page. It's that easy! (No, it's not cheating.)

I strongly encourage you to start developing your own website. Even if you don't think you have skill, you might be surprised how easy, fun, and rewarding it can be. When I started working on our family website (www.naudusfamily.com), I simply wanted to learn and enjoy web development. But once I launched it, I found that it was a lot more than just fun. It has been very useful and rewarding. One of best things about web development is that it's free - if you decide you don't like it, (which I hope won't occur) you're not obligated to keep going because you bought an expensive editor and paid for a year's hosting service. You can even get web hosting for free!

Philip Naudus is currently webmaster of three sites. His newest site is www.xenolth.biz, which is made to help webmasters find the best web design software.

If it is hard to determine, then save it in both formats and compare quality/size ratio. Not much work, big effect.

Having semi- or fully professional graphic editors will allow you to get even better results by selecting compression rate, smoothness, sharpness of edges – if we speak about .JPG format; or palette, colors, rate of transparency, animation features etc. – if we deal with .GIF format.

Today's technological opportunities are vast, so it is you to decide how deeply you want to "dive in".

CROSS-BROWSER & SCREEN RESOLUTION OPTIMIZATION

The numbers are following: - 2% have outdated 14'' with 640*480 pixels in width and height respectively. - 49% of web-surfers use 15" monitors with preferable "standard" screen resolution of 800*600 pixels; - 45% surf web with 17" monitors with reasonable 1024*768 resolution; - 4% of users enjoy 18-19" monitors with 1152*864-1280*1024 screen settings.

What should these numbers tell you? The very simple thing – if you created WS on your 15" monitor, don't assume that it will look as good on other monitors as on yours.

Let me draw several notes here about tendency that monitor market will follow in nearest future. First is that all 14" monitors are gradually going to their deserved eternal rest. Even share of notebooks with 15" TFT screens growing exponentially. There are even several new versions with 16" active matrixes. Don't also forget that notebooks' 14" TFT screen have almost same diagonal inches as usual 15" CRT (Cathode-ray tube) monitors. Secondly, number of 15" monitors is also decreasing, due to growing number of 17" monitor owners that is third point.

One sentence conclusion of above statistics is that your WS should look fine, at least, under 800*600 and 1024*768 resolutions. This is a market demand to your WS and, as we know, you better not joke with The Market.

Without going deep into theory, there are two ways: - more simple; - more complex.

Both correct, both satisfy demand above but letter way, given it is more complex, usually perfectly fits any screen resolution, whether it is 14" or 21" and more favorable to WS space usage.

The easier way would be to make borders of your web-page (tables of your web-page) to be fixed with certain number of pixels. The most popular settings are something between 650 to 750 pixels just to fit that 800 pixels width screen under most popular 15" monitor 800*600 resolution. If you go that way your web-page will have same look under different sets of resolutions. If we try to see it at 14" monitor with 640 pixels in width, unpleasant horizontal scroller would appear because our fixed setting in 700 pixels is wider then 640 and it just won't fit in it. If, on other hand, we look at our imaginable site under 1152*864 or 1280*1024, it will look too narrow, as it will occupy only 60% of screen width (our 700 in comparison to 1200 screen pixels width). Why does this designing way simpler? You just won't have any problems building it: no need for resolution or cross-browser optimization, as fixed pixels are read correctly under almost every browser.

The more complex way is to have width of one or several HTML tables columns on your site to be set in percents like 75% or 100% and, therefore, poses ability to automatically broaden or narrow according to specified percents, depending on what screen resolution site is being viewed under. If you have 600*800 screen settings (the screen width is 600 pixels) and one of table width of your site is set to 100%, then this particular table along with all included text and graphic will narrow to 600 pixels, if we set monitor to 1200*1024 resolution, i.e. having 1200 pixels wide, our site's table will stretch to specified 100%, in that case, 1200 pixels. That's why it looks more attractive under different resolutions but demands additional optimization, including cross-browser optimization, as Netscape Navigator browser has some problems with proper interpreting of percent settings in multi column tables. Which way to choose depends on tasks and your preference.

I wish you endless creativity and no more then 70Kb per page ;0)