You have family and friends scattered across the country, even around the world. Last year you sent them all a Christmas card with the family picture and a letter describing the highlights of your year. This year, you want to do something a little different. You'd send them all a brand new PT Cruiser, but you're concerned that an order for 27 new SUVs might give the Chrysler salesman a coronary. I know, I know, that isn't very realistic. Still, you'd rather not go into debt paying today's postage rates, and sending Hickory Farms sausages and cheese isn't really you. What to do? Why not give the gift of a Christmas Home Page on the World Wide Web?

The number of people with access to the Internet is growing at an amazing rate. Your friend, Elizabeth, who last year had never heard the word emoticon, is now sending you interoffice memos with little :-)'s and <bg>'s peppered throughout. ;-) Your retired father continuously calls with computer questions, and e-mails you links to all kinds of exotic Web sites ("Can you believe what is out there on the Web? Why, I was connected to a computer in Russia the other day!"). If you make your own Christmas Home Page, he can send the link to all his new computer friends!

I've put together a sample page, illustrating what can be done quickly and easily with readily available, even free, Web Page editors: Our Family Christmas. This is by no means the limit of what you can do. In fact, this page is about as simple as it can get, containing nothing but text and a few pictures. You don't have to build just one page either; you can create personalized pages for as many different people as you want. What you do with your pages is limited only by your imagination.

You'll need space on a server for the files of your Home Page. Most local Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and national online companies (like AOL) offer free server space as part of their service. There are also Web sites, like Geocities and Netscape, who offer free Web server space. A search with most any Web Search engine will turn up even more.

You'll also need a Web page editor. If you have Windows '95 or Windows '98, you probably already have Front Page Express on your computer. There is also a version of Front Page for Macintosh. If you don't care for Microsoft products, Composer, a component of Netscape's free browser download, is another excellent choice. America Online offers AOLPress for free, which also makes uploading your page to AOL's server incredibly easy.

Here's where the real fun starts: building your Web page. You can be as creative as your heart desires, putting borders around pictures, centering text here, or pushing it off to the right somewhere else. You can build a wild and colorful page, or a tasteful, elegant page. Let your imagination run wild!

Formatting and putting text into a Web page is no more difficult than typing a document into a word processing program. All you have to do is start typing. There are numerous sites from which to download free clip art, backgrounds and buttons; a few are listed on our Credits page. But how do you get those family pictures on there?

There are basically three different ways for getting your own photographs onto your computer. Use a digital camera, a scanner, or have your photo developer put the pictures on a floppy disk or CD ROM.

You want cheap and easy, right? No, I don't mean a frozen pizza. Probably the easiest way to get pictures digitized is to take the pictures with a digital camera and put them right on your computer. You don't even have to buy film. The images are stored on memory chips, and transferred directly to your computer with a cable that comes with the camera. There are even digital cameras that store pictures on floppy disk, making it as easy as possible to get the pictures to your computer. Prices range from very affordable up to more than $10,000. Epson, Sony, and Kodak are just a few of the companies making quality digial equipment today. The pictures on the sample Christmas Home Page were taken with a three-year-old Epson.

I've never known a computer geek who didn't want a scanner, me included. And they're an excellent choice to get pictures into your computer (the scanners, not the geeks). Scanners, for home use, come in two basic varieties: flat bed scanners and photo scanners. Just take a regular sized photograph (usually no larger than 4" x 6") and slide it into any photo scanner. The scanner and software will do all the work. If you have larger pictures, or if you want to scan documents, a flat bed scanner would be the better choice. The great thing about scanners is that you can digitize any of those old photos you have hidden away in albums. That baby picture you love but embarrasses your teenage daughter? Scan it and show it off to all your friends on the Internet!

Scanners have also become amazingly affordable. Lower quality scanners can be had for less than $100 today, with excellent quality scanners available for sometimes less than $150. You probably shouldn't settle for less than 600 x 600 optical resolution for a flat bed scanner. If your computer has a Univeral Serial Bus (USB) port, I'd suggest getting a scanner with this type of connection. Generally, they are faster than the parallel port (printer port) models.

The third option for getting digital pictures is to have your photo developer put the pictures on a floppy disk or on a Kodak Photo CD. Most developers have some type of option for getting your prints digitized in one fashion or another.

No matter which method you use to get photos onto your computer, you'll probably want, or need, to adjust the color or remove "red-eye" or do some other type of manipulation of the image. Luckily most, if not all, scanners and digital cameras sold today come with image editing software. If yours doesn't, or you don't like the software packaged with your device, inexpensive and powerful software can be had from sites such as Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, or Alchemy Mindworks' Graphic Workshop.

Your Christmas Home Page is built. It looks beautiful! How do you get it on the Web server? You'll need to upload the Web page file, all the picture files and the other graphic files you've incorporated into your page. If you're an AOL member and you use AOLPress, saving the page to AOL's server is a built-in function of the program, and uploads the HTML file and all the photos and graphics with only a button click or two.

Outside of AOL, the most common way to get the files for a Web page to a server is to use an FTP program. Using an FTP program to move files is not much different than copying files in Windows Explorer. If FTP is the method you'll use, be sure to keep track of all the files used during the construction of your page so you'll know just what you need to upload. FTP software can also be gotten from web sites for free or very cheaply. Ipswitch's WS_FTP Pro and BulletProof FTP are both excellent choices.

Creating your own Christmas Home Page can be fun and rewarding. You'll have created a wonderful Christmas gift and your friends and relatives will marvel at your technological savvy! Just find a Web server, get those digital pictures onto your computer, fire up the Web Page editor you like best and upload the files to your server. Voila! You have your Christmas Home Page on the Internet!

Have fun! Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Jeff Petrie is the Art Director and Webmaster for The Rose & Thorn Literary E-zine. To learn more about Jeff, check out his online bio or his personal Web site, Jeff's Web Site.