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Next year the World Wide Web will reach its 13th birthday, which in Internet years is pushing middle age. The Web is no longer a novelty--it's a part of everyday life. And that makes it both easier and harder to establish yourself online, whether for personal or for professional reasons.

Building a Web site is easier these days because of the profusion of high-quality Web tools and services, many available at little or no cost.

But it's also more difficult because simply having a Web site isn't enough anymore. Your site has to be good, and it has to keep growing. In fact, maintaining and upgrading your site may be greater challenges than creating it.

If you're just starting out, this month's Step-by-Step provides a primer on building a simple Web page. But getting that first page posted is only the beginning. It's the upgrades to your site that will keep people coming back.

That's where we can help. We created a basic Web site (see Figure 1) and beefed it up with a message board, two JavaScripts (a navigation menu and an image slide show), and a shopping cart (see "Road Map to a Site Upgrade").

We created our 11-page Web site and got it online for the cost of a Web hosting service, which handled the registration of our domain name for an additional $32 (see "A Host of Hosts"). We did not have to use any advanced Web-development tools or techniques, either. All we had to do was tweak some preexisting HTML and JavaScript (see "A Mini Site Makeover").

Before you begin building pages, decide who you want to bring to your site and what you want them to do there. The goal of our simple site was to introduce people to potential pets currently housed in shelters. The steps we followed are applicable to all sorts of business and personal sites, however.

Think of site visitors as your guests. The design of your site should make them feel welcome and should help them find the information they're looking for quickly. That's why the interface and navigation elements are so important, even on a site that consists of just a handful of pages.

Prioritize the information and services you want to offer your visitors, and make the most important ones easiest to get to.

We planned five sections for our make-believe site, each of them accessible with a single click from the home page or from any other section. All 11 pages on our site include links to the home page and to the top levels of the other sections.

Consider how people will move through your site. Web professionals create "user scenarios" that describe different types of site visitors.

In our example, a young couple looking for a new pet might want a quick way to locate potential adoptees but would also need the shelter's street address and phone number. Recent adopters might want advice on caring for their pet, so we would have to ensure that the shelter's pet-care information is easy for them to find.

Web developers often use flowcharts and storyboards to help them visualize the content of a site's pages and the links between them. You can use a flowcharting program such as the SmartDraw shareware, or you can go the low-tech route: Represent each page with a 3-by-5 card and then draw lines on the cards to represent links. It may sound silly, but this technique can help you get a bird's-eye view of your site.

We made another important choice in designing our pages to use a basic version of Cascading Style Sheets, a powerful method for formatting Web pages. Sites created with CSS can have simpler code than HTML sites.

Versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape prior to 4 don't support CSS, so we duplicated the CSS formatting in each of our site's HTML pages. Most Web editors can handle both CSS and HTML. For a discussion of the pros and cons of working with CSS, see "The Importance of Being Compliant."