By Jonathan Hart

For many people, especially those with little or no computer experience, the World Wide Web can seem intimidating. And the idea of creating your organization's own place on the Web might seem like a daunting task.

The dirty little secret about HTML - a group of commands that tells a browser how to treat text - is that it's really not that tough. The word processing program WordPerfect, for example, includes an option that allows you to reveal the formatting codes. When you do that, you can see the tags that tell the computer to make something bold or italic, start a new paragraph, and so on.

HTML is just like that. Once you learn the codes, you can pretty much make the text look the way you want it to.

So where do you go to learn HTML? Some good places to look include Project Cool, which was co-developed by Glenn Davis, one of the first Web critics and creator of the Cool Site of the Day award. There's also the W3Tech School of Web Design, a self-guided tutorial that offers quizzes after each section to check your progress. Another place to look is the Beginner's Guide to HTML at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA's credentials include Mosaic, the first browser to display graphic images, and Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape.

These are just a few of the many sites available on the Web for learning HTML. A search on Yahoo! for "Beginner's HTML," for example, came up with a category that contained 23 different sites.

Now, the main question: What should your Web site say?

It's important to remember that the Internet is, and always has been, primarily an information source. So for your Web site to be useful, you must provide visitors with information about your organization. Don't skimp: The more a surfer can find out about you, the more informed he or she will be, and the more likely he or she will follow up on the visit.

So be sure to include contact information. You wouldn't hand out business cards that didn't have your name, address and phone number on them, so why would you create a Web site without that information? It's frustrating to come across a site that's all glamour and glitz, with very little content and no way to contact anyone to find out more about the organization. If your site is like that, you might as well not have one.

Your site also should include some way to keep track of visitors. Whether it's a form or guestbook that records visitors' contact information and comments, or an e-mail link that goes to somebody at your organization, capturing e-mail addresses is vital. With them, you can build a database of people you already know have some interest in your organization. Many groups miss out on this incredibly useful function of Web sites. Don't let yours be one of them.

You'll need a place to put your files once you've created them. That's where your Internet service provider (ISP) comes into the picture.

If your organization has Web access, you've already got an ISP. An ISP is a company that offers access to Internet features, including the World Wide Web. Some of the most popular ISPs are America Online, Earthlink and Mindspring. In addition, many phone companies, such as AT&T;, GTE and the Baby Bells, offer Internet access.

On average, an ISP will offer its customers space on its Web server - the computer that actually contains the HTML files - usually about 5 megabytes. This is usually plenty for most small organizations' needs. But if you're planning to have an extensive Web site, you may want to look into the many Web hosting companies that only offer Web space, not Internet access.

Be careful, though: Some ISPs offer different tiers of service, and not all of those tiers may include Web space. It's important to investigate all the features your service plan offers.

Those are the basic steps to creating a Web site for your organization. And remember to always keep your site fresh. People want information. The Web is constantly changing, and your site should change as well.

Jonathan Hart is the Web Developer for the Philanthropy News Network. He can be reached at pj2@mindspring.com