Anyone with enough determination and dedication can produce a popular site, regardless of budget, and with the vast wealth of shareware programs, online tutorials and free web space on offer, it's never been easier or cheaper to get your own pages online.

Many people are quite rightly put off by immense books waffling on about "unleashing the awesome power of HTML", so Max Hits aims to demystify the process of design and inspire you to get building your own great site.

All that fiddling about with code may look tricky at first, but building a website really isn't that hard - and with hundreds of great tutorials available online (listed, left), there's nothing to stop you having your site up and running in no time!

Although you may be tempted to buy a WYSIWYG ('What You See Is What You Get') editor, this is often a false economy.

Although the drag-and-drop approach may make authoring websites a breeze, you'll be restricted to the features on offer, and the template-led approach often leads to many sites all looking the same.

A good knowledge of HTML will put you in control of your design, prove invaluable when things (invariably) go wrong, and make things easier if you want to incorporate JavaScript and other scripting languages on your pages.

HTML really isn't too hard to learn either: I started off years ago by downloading and printing out the excellent free guide at Ncsa.uiuc.edu and a few coffees later, my first few web pages were born!