General Information
About AOL and Your Web Site

Here's a little bit of basic information about creating web pages on AOL. You can also browse these tutorials: AOL has allotted 2MB of space (per screen name) for you to use for your web page. How many files can fit in that 2MB of space? HTML files are simple text files, so they don't take up much room. HTML files are usually under 30K each. We recommend keeping your graphics under 30K each, too. So you would be able to put up over 60 HTML pages and/or graphics and still be under your 2MB limit.

A typewriter You are allowed 5 screen names for every AOL account, so you have a total of 10MB of space to use. This space is provided FREE to you! You can use it to put up a personal or business web page. How you use this space is completely up to you, as long as you follow America Online's Terms of Service Guidelines, located at keyword: TOS.

Creating Your Web Site

To create a web page, you will need to create text pages that are tagged with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) tags. You can create your HTML pages in one of three ways:
  1. By learning the HTML tags, and writing your documents in a word processor or text editor, like NotePad, WordPad, Word, Word Perfect, Simple Text or Teach Text. We have lots of helpful tutorials for beginners.
  2. By using an HTML software application that will add the HTML tags for you. We can recommend the following HTML Editors.

    You can also find many HTML add-ons, editors and tools at Tucows and Shareware.com software sites.

  3. America Online Members can use an online tool called Personal Publisher, located at keyword: PP2. This offers a quick, easy start to a web page. However, we do not advise using Personal Publisher to create a page that includes tables, frames, aligned images, imagemaps, audio, guestbooks, forms, java, or javascript. We recommend using an HTML editor or writing your own HTML if those features are important to you. We also do not recommend using Personal Publisher if you plan to update or edit your page often, especially if you plan to do so from different computers. Part of the Personal Publisher information is stored on the computer that you use to originally create the page on. So, if you loose your hard drive, trash your AOL software, or use a different computer, you're pretty much SOL when it comes to editing your page from that point on. Learn a little HTML, you'll be much happier!

    This was the advice we gave when we ran the forum on AOL. Now that there is no real support for web page creators on AOL, the reasons for using a standard HTML editor are even stronger.

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