Your web page will not have anywhere near as much information as a whole library, but essentially you should require your visitor to access any information in 4 clicks. If it needs more than 4 clicks, your information is probably badly organised and the visitor will probably give up and look elsewhere.

Who can use the DFM2HTML program

Many web sites are in fact designed to impress, either the potential visitor who reacts with a "Gosh, they must be good if they have such an impressive web site with such state-of-the-art features and slick graphics", or the managing director of the company which has hired the web designer, who wants his web site to be slicker and more up-to-date than that of any competitor. Few company web sites are designed so as to enable a visitor to find out what he or she wants to know. Many of them are down right mysterious about simple things like performance figures, prices, telephone numbers or just an address.

If you want an all-dancing all-singing web site with state-of-the art graphics and features, DFM2HTML is not for you. The DFM2HTML program can do quite a lot but is especially suitable for people who want a web site that is well laid out, with the information clearly organised. This attitude shouldn't come as a complete surprise, since the program is the brain child of a German engineer - and engineers, generally speaking, have a tendency to concentrate on being practical. Whereas most other programs are the product of organisations headed by sales people, people who feel they can best sell their product by introducing as many impressive features as possible.

If you have spent a few days or even weeks organising your material and you then spend a day or two getting used to the DFM2HTML program, the construction of the web site - even one with twenty or thirty web pages - should not take more than a few days or perhaps two long weekends. If this idea appeals to you, then DFM2HTML is the program to take up - it will get you up and going within a day or two.

If, at a later stage, you feel the need to add frills and features that aren't found in the DFM2HTML program, there is no need to re-write the whole web page. The new pages can be written in another program with all those special features that you feel you need, uploaded singly on to the hard disk of the provider, and the DFM2HTML program can be altered to provide links to the new web pages. You're not going to waste any time simply because you started on a simple program.

Of course, time doesn't stand still, and the DFM2HTML program may add, in future versions, a lot of features which are now missing. However, the main structure is solid and will serve most people for a long time.

The feature that astonished me most is the ability to change the working language while actually running the program. The reason why this feature appealed to me is that I live in a part of the world where people speaking many different languages live next to one another. Some can speak several languages (I can manage to make myself understood in five) but speaking a foreign language is much easier than working with a computer program in a different language.

So I develop the basic web site in my native language (which happens to be English) and then pass on the result to a German friend who knows nothing about web sites but who wanted a web site he could maintain himself (he runs a small restaurant) with just a little help from me. I can do the same for a Spanish friend (I live in Spain but my Spanish is far from perfect) and even for a Slovak friend (I have learned a little Czech because I have spent several holidays there) although we will have keyboard problems . As Europe becomes more and more integrated, this situation will arise more and more often and so a real multi-lingual environment is a Godsend.

The one thing that was missing from the DFM2HTML program was a handbook. The original tutorial, written by Jörg Kiegeland himself, is terse and doesn't really explain how to use the program to someone who isn't an engineer, isn't a programmer and doesn't live in the world of native HTML (the web programming language) speakers. I learned how to use the program rather like I learned how to ride a bicycle, and this shouldn't be necessary. So that's why I wrote this book, and I hope you'll have an easier time.

Putting up your own web site means taking four distinct steps:

1. selecting and registering a name

there are sites, such as http://www.checkdomain.com/ that you can use to check whether a particular name has already been registered. If it hasn't, and you want to use a name with a permitted ending (such as .com or .uk or whatever) you then must find a company that will register the name. There are all sorts of rules about which names you can and which you can't use, but there is plenty of information about this on the web.