Yahoo! GeoCities is one of the oldest free hosting services. And
it's one of the most popular. How popular? Well, it has a
huge international user base. And it's so popular that
there's a book titled Creating GeoCities Web sites. It's the
only published guide to putting together Web pages for a
specific free hosting service that I've seen.
What sets Yahoo! GeoCities apart from its competitors is the
service's file management capabilities and the PageBuilder
Web authoring tool. The Yahoo! GeoCities file manager gives
you full control over your files -- as much as, or more than,
you have with the file manager in your operating system. With
it, you can delete, copy, rename, preview, edit, and upload
files with only a few clicks. PageBuilder is an advanced
point-and-click HTML editor that has capabilities rivalling
those of many commercial HTML authoring tools. Using
PageBuilder you can position any element on your Web pages,
then preview the page. There is also a set of add-ons that
insert buttons, graphics, lines, and counters into a
document.
In the past, you were forced to pigeonhole your site into a Yahoo! GeoCities
"neighbourhood," based on your area of interest. That was pretty annoying, but in recent years this hasn't been the case. Why? The URLs were long, and required a lot of typing.
Angelfire
Angelfire is a solid service that has some
nice features, but which can also be quite annoying. The nice
features include a pair of easy-to-use HTML editors. One lets
you type in your HTML code; perfect for the experienced Web
builder. The other editor is more of a wizard aimed at the
newbie. With it, you can choose a pre-defined layout, as well
as specify the colours to use on your pages. You can also
pick graphics, set up a list of links, and type in some body
text. Best of all, you can arrange where on the page these
elements will appear. You don't get as much control as you
would with the code-based editor but it's a good way to
quickly get up and running.
What I found annoying about Angelfire is that it insists all
Web page files have the extension .html. This is fine if
you're building from scratch, but not so good if you're
moving your files from another location. You may have to
change the file names and any internal links.