There are a number of excellent, professional-quality tools available for creating and publishing web pages. If you are going to do a lot of web publishing, you probably will want to invest in one or more of these, but to get started you don't need anything except:

• A computer where you will edit your pages. Any computer, from a mainframe to a home PC, will work just fine as long as it can edit text and connect to the Internet.
• A text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad, OS/2 System Editor, DOS edit, Linux Kedit or vi, or the Macintosh text editor. Note that you need to use a text editor, not a word processor. The latter will store formatting and layout information in a format that is specific to that particular program, but web browsers expect pages to be (for the most part) standard text documents. Some word processors have a "Save as HTML" or "Save as Web Page" feature -- that's a different matter entirely, and is not covered in this tutorial.
• A standard web browser, such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, IBM Web Explorer, Opera, HotJava Browser, or Lynx.
• The ability to connect to the Internet, and a program supporting the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Even if you can't connect your own computer to the Internet, you can still create pages and give them to someone else on a floppy disk for publication.
• An Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is the company providing the web server (generally a large, fast computer) where your pages will actually be published. This service is called "web hosting." Finding a web hosting ISP is covered later in this tutorial.

These lessons assume that you know how to create, copy, rename, and delete files and folders (directories) on your computer, that you know how to connect to the Internet, and that you know how to use your web browser to view other people's pages.

The instructions are written with an IBM-compatible PC in mind, but most of what is provided here is applicable to Macintosh computers as well. (If anyone has a Mac and would like to suggest Mac-specific additions to the pages, please contact the author.) One of the nicest things about the World Wide Web is that properly-written web pages can be created on just about any kind of computer and viewed on a totally different kind of computer. In the lessons that follow, you will see how to make sure this is true of your pages as well.