Hello! I'm Beverly Nash. I manage the front office of a veterinary clinic in Spokane, Washington, which means I answer the phone, keep the appointment book, and talk people down off the ceiling when their dog has eaten a sock. At home I have two Pembroke Welsh Corgis, Tater and Duchess, and last winter I decided they deserved a home page.

Everybody told me I'd need to buy a program to make one. I didn't. I built my whole page with Netscape Composer, and I'd bet you have it too. If you have Netscape Communicator, the whole package and not just the Navigator browser, Composer came in the box. Netscape has given Communicator away free since early last year, and it's on half the CDs that come in the mail. A lot of people have had it on their computers for a year and never once opened it.

Here's how to use it, the way I wish someone had explained it to me.

Is it on my computer?

Open Netscape the way you always do. Look at the menus along the top. If there's one called Communicator, open it, and you'll see Composer in the list. There's also a little row of icons in the bottom right corner of the Netscape window, and one of them opens Composer. If you don't have the Communicator menu, you have the browser by itself, and you'll need to get Communicator, which is free.

Another way in: when you're looking at any page in Netscape, the File menu has Edit Page, which opens that page in Composer. Don't do it to somebody else's page and put it up as your own, of course. But it's a good way to see how something was made.

Starting a page

In Composer, go to File, New, and pick Blank Page. You'll get a white window that looks like a word processor. That's the whole idea.

Typing and formatting

Just type. Press Enter to start a new paragraph. Press Shift and Enter together when you want the next line to start right underneath, without the space of a new paragraph, which is handy for addresses and poems.

The second row of buttons is for formatting, and it works like a word processor: select some words, then click Bold, Italic or Underline, pick a font, a size or a color. The box on the far left that says Normal is the important one. Click in a line, open that box, and choose Heading 1 for a big title or Heading 2 for a smaller one. Headings are better than just making the words bigger, because they're real headings and not just big words.

Don't go wild with fonts. If you choose a fancy font from your computer, people who don't have that font will just see Times. I stick with Arial for the words and leave the headings alone.

Page Colors and Properties

Go to the Format menu and choose Page Colors and Properties. On the General tab, type a Title for your page. That's what shows in the bar at the top of the window and in people's bookmarks, so make it say something, like "Tater and Duchess, Two Corgis in Spokane," not "Untitled."

On the Colors and Background tab, you can choose the color of your words, your links, and your background, or pick a picture to use as the background. Composer shows you a little preview as you go. My page is white with dark green words, because the clinic is mint green and I'm in a rut.

Inserting a picture

Click where you want the picture, then click the Image button on the top row (or Insert, Image). In the box that opens, click Choose File and find your picture, which should already be in your web page folder. Composer fills in the size for you. Click the button for alternative text and type a few words describing the picture, like "Tater asleep on the couch," so people who can't see it know what it is. Then OK.

Pictures for the Web should be GIF or JPEG files. If you've scanned a photo, save it as a JPEG, and keep it small. Mine are no wider than 300 pixels, and nobody has ever complained the Corgis were too small.

Making a link

Select the words you want people to click. Then click the Link button. If you're linking to another page of your own, click Choose File and pick it from your folder. If you're linking to somebody else's page, type its address into the box. OK, and your words turn blue and underlined. To see if it works, click Preview, which opens your page in Navigator.

A simple table

Tables are how you put things side by side, like a picture next to its story. Click the Table button. Fill in how many rows and columns, the border (0 for none, 1 for a thin line), and the width. I always set the width to a percentage of the window, not a number of pixels, so the table fits whatever size screen people have. Click OK and type in the boxes. Here's the one I made for my two:

(Corgis were bred to herd cattle by nipping at their heels, and nobody has told mine that there aren't any cattle in Spokane. Pembrokes are the ones without much tail. The other kind, the Cardigan, has a long one. And yes, the Queen of England has Pembrokes. I get asked that at least once a week at the clinic.)

What Composer gets wrong

Composer is a good program and it's free, and I love it. But it has a few habits you need to know about.

1. Pictures that work for you and nobody else. This is the big one. If you insert a picture before your page has been saved into the same folder, Composer may write down where the picture is on your computer, like this:

<img SRC="file:///C|/corgis/tater.gif"
 height=225 width=300>

That file:///C|/ means "the C: drive." On your computer, the picture shows up perfectly, because there it is, on your C: drive. On the Web, every visitor's browser goes looking on their own C: drive, and of course it isn't there. You get a broken picture for everybody in the world except you, and you'll never see the problem by looking at your own page on your own computer. I had four pictures like that for a month before my niece Adriana looked at my page from her office in Seattle and called to ask why the Corgis were little boxes with red X's.

The fix is to save the page into your picture folder first, then insert the pictures, and Composer writes just the file name: SRC="tater.gif". If it's too late for that, see the fixes on the publishing page.

2. The GENERATOR tag. Look at the source of any page you made in Composer (in Navigator, View, Page Source) and near the top you'll find something like:

<meta name="GENERATOR"
 content="Mozilla/4.61 [en] (Win98; I)
 [Netscape]">

That's Composer signing its work. It doesn't hurt anything. It just tells anybody who looks at your source what you used, and which version of Windows you have. Leave it or take it out, your choice. It's on every page I've made, and the Corgis don't mind.

3. Leftovers. Composer leaves little things behind. Empty paragraphs with &nbsp; in them (that's a "non-breaking space," a blank that holds a line open). <br>&nbsp; at the end of table cells. The same <font> tag opened again and again on every paragraph. None of it breaks anything, but it makes your page a little bigger and your source hard to read. If something looks wrong and you can't fix it in Composer, that's usually why.

4. When to give up and open Notepad. Sometimes a picture won't move, or there's a gap you can't get rid of, and the only way to fix it is to look at the HTML itself. Composer can take you there: Edit, HTML Source. The first time, it asks which program to use; pick Notepad (it's in your Windows folder, as notepad.exe). Make your change in Notepad, save and close it, then go back to Composer and open the page again to see the change.

One warning: Notepad has no Replace command, so if you have to change the same thing twelve times, open the file in WordPad instead and use Edit, Replace. Just be sure to save it as a Text Document, not a Word document, or you'll get a page full of garbage.

Visitors since April 1999:


Questions about Composer, or Corgis: [email protected]
Made with Netscape Composer, of course.
Last updated Saturday, September 11, 1999