Building your homepage - my conception

If you wanna build a homepage of your own, you need several things:

A webspace provider who gives you space to upload the pages or your own server
A page-editor to write the pages with
knowledge of programming a webpage
a ftp-client to upload the files
and last not least you have to have an idea of what you wanna provide as contents and how it shall look like

Me for example I have written a lot about my sparetime favourites, have put here several pictures, I've drawn myself, parts of my selfwritten stories, I talk about my favourite writers, about music, about being gay and about politics etc. pp.

design

You need not only have to have ideas about the contents. Look at me (or perhaps better at my page ): you also should spend a thought or two on the design. I was helped here by Tino Groß. He mainly got the credits for layout and design after the first big relaunch of this page. But the actual design is mainly mine but based on the one created by Tino. I had to change several things which I weren't very lucky about. I only lately had have to change the navigation bar on the left hand to provide you direct access to the English contents without clicking to much and also to change the number and topictures of the links. (At this point let me tell you, that I still have to translate a lot before you have full access. )

Editors

Before you start you should spend a thought to the tools you wanna use. See here: professional editors like Dreamweaver for example do cost a lot. They're usually not for free - not if you want to get it in a legal transaction. So I put on the linkpage two links to tools who can be downloaded legally for free. You should use them or a similar code-colour-coding editor, although you could use also a simple texteditor, but I won't advise you to because you will see quite in time that you may get confused in the code should you use a very simple editor. And NEVER use Microsoft Word for homepage editing, Word is able to produce HTML-Code but it isn't the best thing to do, because Word puts therein things several browsers (not even Microsofts own IE) can interprete.

I put a linkpage on this site where you should find nearly anything about the programming.

webspace

But I haven't linked there any webspace providers. That wouldn't make any sense because you have to compare the price-performance payoff of several providers. Also you have to look whether they're offering space to you or not (depends mainly on the country you live in). Although the WorldWideWeb gives you access to freely provided information nearly worldwide that does not mean that any webspace provider operates worldwide. Not everyone accepts VISA or MasterCard and not everyone accepts payments in ¥ or £ or €.

When you look at this page you may have already guessed that it was build on a computer not to fast running / reacting and without having a display big and wide as the Niagara Falls (indeed it's a 14 inch TFT on a Pentium II tuned up to 308 MHz).

Translations

Well, there's still something to be said about translating my pages into English: I don't know whether it's useful to translate everything, because several things are so special, so German that I don't really think it worth translating it. Perhaps you like to tell me via email which things you want to be translated.

Well, perhaps I have to give you also an explanation why I bought / rented so many topleveldomains for my webspace: because I was able to and wanted much traffic.

appendix Sept., 25th 2006: I'm thinking of redesigning the page.
I don't want to be ungrateful but the best design isn't reaaly good if the pageowner can't adjust it to his purposes and necessities without dimissing details and parts of the design which were useful and important for the whole conception. Well. Now I have to work again on a complete (?) new design because several parts I added or had already to change don't really fit to the orginal.
And always when you delegate works to others because you don't have the knowledge or the tools to do it yourself, you have to pay the price, that you can't easily change anything although you have to because the things do not fit to your purposes. So you have to learn.

appendix Sept., 28th 2006: Now you see the results of the "re-designing".

appendix Oct., 2nd 2006: You may have a look at the two designs made by Tino: design N° 1 & design N° 2; the second is a real screenshot; the first couldn't be recreated again. But was similar. Both designs had an animated navigationbar with JavaScript-controled changing of images. My new navigationbar has not only several different entries but also a different kind of colourchanging mechanism: via CSS-stylesheet. And then there's another one, which has small modifications made by me

The whole Unicode Standard Version 5.0.0 should be available in every book store: ISBN 0-321-48091-0 erhältlich, you may also download it as PDF .PDFs.

My guestbook / my blog

I've deleted my guestbook recently @ multiguestbook.com. The background story for this action is the following: I was just checking for new entries when I was asked to register again and give information about my plcae of residence, phone numbers etc. I didn't agree with the guestbook provider that he should have this information or would ever need it - except for spamming me. So I deleted the guestbook. I will have a look out for an acceptable solution to this problem. But in the meantime I beg your pardon and advise you to use the eMail form to drop me a line or two if you wish to do so. Or visit my blog.