So you want to create a personal Internet site so that your family overseas can see some of your photographs or read about the latest gossip on the rock.

Or perhaps you have a small business that doesn't need anything more sophisticated than a few pictures, a description of each item and how to order by telephone or fax.

Well the good news is that you don't need to pay a web designer a zillion dollars to create such a site. There are lots of free software programs and help sites available on the Internet to help get you through the night.

This is not a knock against the Web designer profession. It's just that most of us don't have the money to pay for a professionally designed site. It's usually not worth it for a personal site.

A good Web designer offers creativity and the experience with Internet style to create a site that looks uncluttered, is easy to navigate, and gets the viewer to the information they're looking for quickly. But by following the same basic principles you may surprise yourself and everyone else with what you can do.

You have to be prepared to do some steady sitting at your computer and be able to wade through some of the technical jargon (hint -- it's easy), and experiment. When we've gone through the basics I'll also show you how to put on your site a free search engine, an updated news section, and a counter to tell you how many visitors hit your site. Yep, these tools are also available on the Internet for free.

I am assuming you already have some computer space at an Internet service provider (ISP) and have surfed the Web extensively so that you know how the medium works. If you haven't got any space get some.

Visit the Internet sites of Logic Communications Ltd. (http://www.logic.bm) or North Rock Communications (http://www.northrock.bm) for more information about creating your personal Web page. Both ISPs offer free computer space if you are a customer. Both providers don't specify how much space they provide but it must be a bit as some people have put up quite a few graphics. Both sites also provide an online guide to creating your own pages.

You can also visit some of the Web pages created by their customers to get an idea of how simple or sophisticated you can get with a basic knowledge. There are some quite interesting sites up there.

However if you don't want to use either provider you could also sign up at www.geocities.com, which in return for giving you free space will add some advertising to your site.

Geocities' advantage is the useful online page creator that helps you through the process of writing hypertext markup language (HTML). The site also has some basic templates you can use if you don't want to go through the hassle of designing your own. But the process can be slow. It's better to create your pages at leisure and then upload it to your space on the Internet.

The key to creating an Internet site is to attempt to automate as many tasks as possible so that you're not constantly writing HTML or resizing and tweaking photographs every time you want to add a page to your Internet site.

HTML is the basic language used to create documents or pages people view through browsers on the Internet. It's is a language that the browser translates into a page people can view.

To see what's behind an Internet page simply go to a site then click on "View'' and "Source'' in your Internet browser. That's it! Most Internet pages are simply basic text files with the HTML language. Renaming the end of the file from ".txt'' to ".html'' or "'.htm'' tells the browser to translate the page properly.

So how do you go about creating your first page? First find out about the basic HTML codes from Logic or NorthRock so you'll understand what you're doing. Both sites have links to some basic descriptions of the process. Then find an HTML editor. To avoid having to write HTML what you need is WYSIWYG software. This horrible acronym means 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get'. This means the software hides most of the HTML and you see the page while you're creating it as if it's being viewed by a browser.

You may already have an HTML editor on your computer. If you splurged and bought Office 2000 Premium then you have a great HTML editor in FrontPage. If you don't have Office Premium then it costs about US$150 to buy FrontPage.

The free stuff is usually more difficult to use and not as simple, however they work.

Handy hints for page design If you're using the full version of the latest Netscape Communicator browser then you will have Netscape Composer. I've used Composer extensively before switching to FrontPage, but I can recommend it as a good start. Netscape Communicator is available for free at www.netscape.com.

Other free HTML editors are available for download at www.zdnet.com site. In the search feature on the site type in ''HTML editor'' and you'll be given the list of page creators available. Many are free, some are not.

HTML Editor Pro v1.0 is probably not worth bothering about if you've started using Netscape Composer. However once you've learned the basics through Composer or by reading up on HTML I would recommend giving the Gypsy HTML Editor a test run.

Gypsy's tool tabs will speed up the process of creating Internet pages, and allow you to understand the language.

Next week we'll deal with graphics and how to edit them and place them.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. You can contact Ahmed at editor y offshoreon.com or (33) 467901474.