Lessons in HTML can be a sound investment

I want to set up my own Web page and upload it to some of the search engines. Can you write about the best way to go about doing this please? Hopefully you could include information on features such as adding site hits, secure transactions, hyperlinks, and anything you feel would be interesting to know about.

MARK REIS Hong Kong You are asking me to write a book, and one that's been written by plenty of other people before me. For you, two good books with which to start would be Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference by Jennifer Niederst and Richard Koman, followed by 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site by Susan Sweeney. They are available from www.amazon.com. Just in case you are new to the world of HTML, I suggest you go about learning about it from scratch. While there are plenty of Web design programs with graphical user interfaces - such as Adobe's GoLive 4.0 - with which you can create Web pages even if you don't know even one piece of HTML code, it will serve you well in the long run to learn with a program such as BBEdit.

This is a basic HTML editor that lets you work at the code level. HTML commands are not difficult to learn, and once you have got the hang of them you will find yourself much more comfortable with the whole Web-design process. If you use graphical programs later on, your knowledge of HTML code will help debug errors with Web pages. There will be plenty of them.

On a Macintosh, how do I go about changing the titles of the coloured labels with which I can mark files and folders. The default labels have names such as Essential, Hot, Cool and so forth. I would like to edit them to read Joe's or Don't Touch, for instance.

JOE WONG Hong Kong Click on the desktop, go to Edit on the menu bar, click on Preferences and edit the names of the labels in the box that pops up. For future reference, 'how to' items like this are covered in a computer's on-line Help. Given the high number of questions this column received every week, and the low chances of getting an answered published, it would make sense to check the on-line help file first.

Again there has been a flurry of requests for help picking notebooks.

Call it laziness if you like, but I hate repeating what someone else has done well enough before. Technology Post's sister publication PC Post carried a guide to buying notebooks in Hong Kong in its issue last Thursday. The report is available on the Web at http: //www.technologypost.com/PCPost/ Article/19990519202735297.asp, headlined Lean Times for Notebooks.

E-mail Larry Campbell at techtalk scmp.com. Questions to Tech Talk will not be answered personally. Technology Post reserves the right to edit letters.