ut before diving right in, you might want to know how the Web works. The technical details of the whole thing make me really sleepy, so I'll make this quick. But by understanding the basics, you'll have a better idea of what's going on behind the scenes of your Web site, and this will help you do some cool stuff with it down the road.

The main thing we're dealing with is the Internet, this huge network of connected computers. Since all these computers are connected to one another, all over the world, it's easy for information to be passed from place to place. That's how email works - and chat rooms and newsgroups and all that. People all around the world are using their computers to connect to other computers and exchange data.

The World Wide Web is the fancy-pants part of the Internet. With email, you usually just have plain old black-and-white text, but the Web has colors and pictures and sounds and movies. What makes all this action possible is your Web browser - such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer or whichever one you're using to read this. The browser is able to read a certain kind of code and translate it into a Web page.

That code is called HTML (which stands for hypertext markup language), and it's the main thing you'll need to learn to make your own Web site. HTML sounds scary, and it scared me when I was first getting started, but it's not too tricky to learn.