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Do you balk at the thought of making your own website? You are not alone. Many people think that creating a site is just too hard. I want to put you straight, it?s not as hard as you may think.

Some years ago you would have needed to know how to code HTML. That is no longer the case. There are many software products available that make it easy to produce a web site. Having some knowledge of HTML is an advantage but by no means a necessity.

There is open source software available that is every bit as powerful as the paid for variety. Open source software is created by a community of programmers around the world that work together to produce useful software. Just to highlight how good much of this open source software is; Have you heard of Apache Server Software? Apache is the preferred software used on most servers today. This is open source software, free.

The free open source software I have used is called NVU (pronounced N-View). If you search Google for nvu you will then be able to choose a download that suites your operating system.

Making Use Of NVU

Let?s look at using NVU. NVU is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). It looks much like any word processor program but it does not work like one.

One of the main problems you face is how to place text and images where you want them. Like all things they are easy once you know how. In this article we are going to concentrate on how to put things where you want them to appear.

The screen looks like a word processor and all the text features work the same as any word program. You can choose the font, size, bold it, and so on as you would in any program.

How do you place text and images just where you want them to be? The key to this is tables. The use of tables allows you to put anything just where you want them. If you need to place text next to an image, all you need to do is create a table with 2 columns. In one column you place the image and in the other you place the text.

You can also create tables inside tables. This will allow you to create a box inside a table. The background color can be set for each table and even per column. You can set the width of a table by pixels or by percent. If you created a table that was 70% and the centered it it will be 70% of the width of the table it was created into.

You can look at tables as the building blocks of the web page. These building blocks will allow you to set out your page to look as you want it to. Many of these blocks need to be invisible so that only the objects are seen and not what holds them there. You can do this by specifying the border as zero. This will mean that you table will not be seen.

Mastering this will make it possible for you to create a professional looking site. From here much of the program is like any other and you will soon master the use of it with a little experimentation. Understanding how NVU works is also a lesson in Dreamweaver or Microsoft Front Page as these programs work much the same.

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