Designing a Webpage Using Microsoft Word
Your solution may be to design your website using Microsoft Word. It requires little or no technical knowledge to design a website using Word, and you don’t have to know a thing about html. I don’t have a lot of personal experience putting websites on the Internet, only a little (I did put my church’s website online), but I do have an Associate Degree in Applied Business. My major was Microcomputer Business Administration, and my specialization was Web Administration. I can tell you it is much, much, easier to design a website using Microsoft Word than using html. You might be surprised at how good a website designed with Word can look.
It doesn’t matter why you want to design a site. It can be easy and fun to create, whether the site will be your own personal website, a family site, a site for your club, or for a small business.
First off, look at some of your favorite websites. What features do they have that you might like in your own website? Once you do that you have taken the first step.
The first thing you need to know is that you can make any document you create in Word a webpage by simply clicking on File at the top of your window, and then click on Save as a Webpage. Once you name your webpage and save it, your document is a webpage that is ready to be put on the Internet. That is all there is to making a document a webpage, but now we will examine how to make a document more interesting.
Microsoft Word provides themes and backgrounds for any document, whether you are creating a letter, newsletter, or webpage. At the top of your window click on Format. You will see both Theme and Background listed. Background will just make your page whatever color you want. With Theme, you will get more choices. You will be able to choose from a variety of themes, including colors for your webpage, lines and other features on the page, and the color you want your hyperlinks to be. As you click on any one of the themes, it will show you what the finished product would look like.
As you make changes to your webpage you have created in Microsoft Word, you can preview it in a default web browser, to see what it would look like on the Internet. To do that, click File and then Web Page Preview.
Microsoft Word has a Web Tools toolbox, with a variety of features to make your webpage more interesting. Click View, point to Toolbars, and click Web Tools. As you point to each feature, it will have a name that will show what the feature is for.
One feature will say, “Scrolling Text.” When you click on that feature, you will be able to create a text box that you can place anywhere on your webpage and make the size you want. There will be a place to type the desired text. That text will continually scroll across your webpage. You can even control the speed it scrolls at.
Another feature will say, “Movie.” You will be able to add any movies that are on your hard drive to your webpage. I don’t have any on mine, so I can’t tell you much about that feature.
Another feature will say, “Sound.” You can add a sound clip by clicking on the Sound button, and the Background Sound dialog box, click Browse. At the Open dialogue box, click the down-pointing triangle at the right side of the Look in option box. Click My Computer, then your C drive, then Windows, followed by Media. Then double click the desired sound track. On the Loop option box, click the number of times you want the track to play from one to five, or infinite. Click OK to close the Background Sound Dialog Box. Save the webpage again.
There are other things you can create on your webpage by using Microsoft Word by clicking on various features, such as a checkbox, an option button, a drop down box, and a regular text box.
Without using the Web Tools toolbox, you can also click Insert and click on Picture, followed by one of the various options, to add a picture, image, or clipart to your webpage.
To add a hyperlink to another webpage or an e-mail address, click insert hyperlink, which looks a little like a globe with a link in front of it, on your main toolbar. You will be given a place to type the actual text you want to appear. You will be given the option of what you want to link to, such as an existing webpage or one of your files or an e-mail address.
You can also choose from a variety of types of fonts by clicking on Format. The types of fonts and sizes for you to choose from will be displayed. You can also choose the color of the text on your webpage by using the same option. By clicking on Text Effects, you can choose from a variety of effects for the text on your webpage, such as shimmering, sparkling, marching black ants, marching red ants, and others.
If you want to put your webpage on line, it is possible to put some websites online for free. Using an Internet search, type in the words, “free web hosting.” Using a free host, however, will make your site harder to find on a search engine and will usually require having the name of the host in your web address, before or after the name you choose for your site. Needless to say there are a variety of hosts who will put your site online if you pay them, and some are inexpensive.
This article has mentioned some of the most important features to use in designing your own website by using Microsoft Word. As you explore Word yourself, you well might find others.
