Thanks for the compliment, Nell! I've had several personal email conversation about websites with Kate, as well as with another gardener writer, and will share some of my thoughts here. In general, we are well served to design most websites in a common format, because that is what people (and search engine spiders) are used to seeing. This is a menu either across the top or down the left side (or both)  title and logo at the top, and the splash page content on the right. At the last GWA meeting in Vancouver, I got a very valuable piece of advice about the left-side menu. One of the speakers mentioned that your links should finish the sentence: "I want toÂ." So the link could be "Contact Kate" or "View KateÂs Portfolio" for example. It should be easy to find contact information. If you go with ads, they should be unobtrusive, and it should be easy to tell what is your content and what is an ad. I have been testing Google ads on my site for awhile I think that the way IÂve used them is not too conspicuous, but IÂm not fully convinced about their usefulness at this point. The text should be easy to read. Sounds self-explanatory, but IÂm amazed at the number of sites I visit with small fonts, or pale colored lettering. I personally find black backgrounds too dominating, and flashing or moving symbols annoying. When putting content on the site, you have to first think of your overall purpose for designing and paying for the site in the first place. If you are looking for work as a garden writer, then there should be some samples of your writing, a resume, and some illustrations at the very least. (The mention of illustrations is important  People are used to seeing photos or illustrations presented with text, and will more quickly leave a site that is all text.) A page of links on your site will help bring people to you, through a "back door." (They are searching for one thing on a search engine, and your website appears.) As I explained to Kate, one of the best things I ever did was to hire someone to help me with the website. When I was doing it all myself I would have to re-learn the software every time, and so my updates were few and far between. Now I can email new articles, photos, and schedule updates to the woman who helps me, and within a couple of days the changes are made.

I have W 7 and I right click on the picture, then "save image as", then my desktop comes up and I click on save.

Do not follow those directions. The w3c (World Wide Web Consortium, the people who create web standards) specifically designed CSS (Cascading style sheets) to be able to handle specific types of media, including printing. Using a CSS page (set for media="print") allows you to not have to make a separate printer friendly page. CSS separates content from design ie your .html page would have <p class="main_text">Some text here<p> and the .css page (linked in a <link> tag) will have p.main_text " color: #999; font-size: 2em; > Now if every page linked to that style sheet and I wanted to change the way that the text displayed I can change it in one place and it will affect the whole site. Print stylesheets offer special commands that printers can understand, such as where to put page breaks, whether a page is a left or a right (for double sided printing), margins etc. You can also turn elements of your page "off" by using "display: none;" This way you can turn off things like a navigation bar (who needs to see that on a printed web page?). If you are going to be creating a website XHTML and CSS are the de facto standards for all future web design as layed out by the w3c. There are plenty of tutorials on web. Good luck.

You can make anything into a "button", meaning something you click on to get to another page. You just need to know the full URL for what you want it to be linked to, and the full URL of the image that will be clicked on. Then you type the following code, replacing [ and ] with : [a href="URL of destination page here"][img src="URL of button image here" border=0][/a] The border=0 is nice because it gets rid of the blue line that normally goes around any linked image.