When attempting to build your personal Internet site, or a low-rent commercial one, I would suggest that you first create a few simple linked pages before adding all the additional features outlined in the previous columns.

The basic plan for a site is a home page and then links off it to other pages.

I know that sounds too simple to mention. But I've visited too many personal and commercial sites where the information is buried so deep that it is too frustrating to find.

Sites tend to get messy over time and once the chaos begins you've lost your visitors. Attention spans on the Internet last about the speed of a click.

Do not let your site become a Web page dustbin. Clean out all those JPEG picture files and other files from your server every so often. This ensures that you don't go over the limited space available on your free server (see the first column!).

This column continues in the theme of the previous three columns on free utilities and services to make creating your site a lot easier. Here's two more.

If you're using an Internet server provider that allows you to FTP files into your space on the Web then you're going to need what's called an FTP client.

This is software that uses file transfer protocol to allow you to open a connection between your computer and your space on a remote server. You can then transfer files between the two computers using the FTP client. You'll need to get the log-in details for your space from your provider.

Once you know the address of that file you can bring it up in your Internet browser. If you have your own domain name, by convention, the browser will default to index.html or index.htm when the name is typed in without specifying a specific HTML file.

My favourite FTP client is LeechFTP, a free piece of software that's still available on the Internet at various sites. You can still get it at DaveCentral (www.davecentral.com), www.download.com, www.webware.com, or www.zdnet.com sites for example. If you don't like LeechFTP, try searching on those sites for other free FTP clients such as Cupertino, AutoFTP, FTP Commander, and Esftp. Just do a search on the download sites to find them.

Once your site starts to grow it's easy to mess up the links. Then your visitors get the dreaded `404' page, the default page that pops up when a browser requests a link that doesn't exist on a server. For fun check out the 404 Research Lab at http://www.plinko.net/404 for a paean to error 404. To save you a lot of frustration in checking mistyped or missing links there are some sites on the Internet that will do a scan check of all those links.

Dr. Watson (http://watson.addy.com) offers such a service, but only scans a single page at a time. Dr. Watson will check that all links off the page go to another valid page or a graphic. It will also check for browser compatibility, for spelling mistakes, for correct HTML syntax, and very importantly, the time it takes at various speeds to load the page.

As a rule of thumb, if Dr. Watson's site-checking robot tells you that your page takes over 30 seconds to load on a 56K speed modem then take out some graphics. Otherwise, you're inflicting the World Wide Wait on your visitors.

Other sites that do the same thing are www.websitegarage.com and www.netmechanic.com. Netmechanic will check up to five pages for you.

Another option to consider is SiteChecker, a free piece of software that you download to your computer and use from there to check your site.

SiteChecker will parse through a website from your desktop and locate all file references such as images, and HTML pages, all files, both used and unused, including file sizes, and all off-site references that do not exist.

SiteChecker can be downloaded from www.softropolis.com.

That's it for the run down on utilities you can use to make building your Internet site a less traumatic job. Once you feel you're really great you can sign up (yes for free but only for one year) to the HTML Writers Guild. Then you can stick a neat logo that you belong to a semi-select group who drink cola, eat chips, stare at a screen most of the day and actually remember what HTML stands for.