Newsgroups

Newsgroups can be a great source of information to help you create your sites.

To access newsgroups (also called usenet) you'll need a newsreader program. Outlook Express can act as a newsreader, but there are much better dedicated programs available, such as Free Agent.

When posting to newsgroups, make sure that your message is relevant to the group. Don't repost the same message several times or you'll get a reputation as a spammer. Finally, read the FAQ document for the group (normally posted every week) which gives answers to the most commonly asked questions and clarifies what should and shouldn't be posted in that particular group.

Help Me!

The main thing you can use newsgroups for is asking questions and advice when you can't do something. You'll be able to get advice on all sorts of topics - just ask nicely and you'll hopefully have an answer in no time.

Here are some groups that I've stumbled accross to wet your appetite - scan through your reader's list and you'll find hundreds of web design realted groups.

alt.html
alt.html.critique
alt.html.tags
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets
comp.lang.javascript
demon.homepages.authoring
freeserve.webspace.authoring
it.comp.www.html
microsoft.public.inetsdk.html_authoring

In my opinion, the smaller ISP groups are more useful as there are fewer messages so your's is more likely to be noticed. They also tend to be friendlier in my experience!

Publicity

If you want to announce your new website to the world, there are two types of group that you can use. First, see if there are any groups dealing with the topic of your website - given that there are tens of thousands, it's quite likely that there are!

Secondly, there are specialist announcement groups. Most ISP's provide a newsgroup that its members can use to announce their sites and get feedback from other readers. Generally, these groups have ".announce" at the end - for example, freeserve.webspace.announce.

Usenet Archive

If you've got a question that you want to ask on a newsgroup, it's quite possible that it's been asked before. You can search a complete archive of newsgroup posts using Google's usenet service at http://www.groups.google.com.

You can perform simple searches on the entire archive or use the Power Search facility to be more specific about what you're looking for. The site is very well designed and makes browsing this huge resource simple.