Perhaps the problem was the tool I’d used to create the site. After all, there’s only so much you can do with Windows Notepad. So I downloaded a copy of FlyTrap, a shareware HTML editor whose $20 registration fee seemed right up my alley.

And it was. Going from Notepad to FlyTrap involved no learning curve at all. In fact, I couldn’t find a single difference between the two programs aside from FlyTrap’s row of icons with helpful names like <DT>, <HR>, and <DIR>. To help you understand what the icons were for, each included a picture of the world being devoured by a gigantic spider.

After three hours with FlyTrap, I had succeeded in creating a new Society home page, complete with overlapping text, a black-on-black color scheme, and links that led only to the Internal Revenue Service’s FTP site. This clearly wasn’t the tool for me.

Over the next five days, I examined enough shareware Web development tools to choke a server. Finally, my registry a tattered history of countless installs and failed uninstalls, I tore my bloodshot eyes from the screen and headed for the door. I was going to have to buy a commercial Web tool.

The one I picked was PaddyPage, by MicroClarity Software. The ads called it "The Everything-In-One-Box WYSIWYG Solution For Serious, Professional Web Developers Who Don’t Want to Learn HTML." Of course, the box also said that PaddyPage required 48MB of hard disk space, which turned out to refer only to what the installation program added to the registry.

As soon I had PaddyPage up and running, I eagerly opened up my Society Web Site folder and dragged my home page HTML file to the PaddyPage window. "Well, okay," I said to myself. "So PaddyPage doesn’t support drag and drop. Hey, neither did WordPerfect 4.1."

Once I’d loaded my page by selecting Open from the File menu and confirming three times that I really did want to open a file that wasn’t in the "C:\MicroClarity\PaddyPage\Documents\Put Your Data Here\Or Else" folder, it was time to give the Silent Film and Flemish Country Dance Society a new look.

PaddyPage is what they call a "WYSIWYG HTML development tool," which means that instead of writing meaningless code to define the look of your page, you enter meaningless numbers into obscure dialog boxes, while an opaque version of your page appears on screen.

My first task was to add a table, which I started by clicking the icon of the periodic table of elements sitting underground in the water table of a formal restaurant. This presented me with a dialog box for entering the table’s size, borders, color, alignment, vertical alignment, and cell padding (you’ll probably need cell padding after using this program). After examining PaddyPage’s online help ("Vspace: Enter a number here to set your table’s vspace coordinate") and rushing out to buy six books on HTML, I managed to create an invisible, two-column table that I thought was 100% of the width of the page with a 150-pixel first column. Or maybe the table was 100 pixels wide and the first column was 150% of the table. It was hard to tell, since the WYSIWYG PaddyPage didn’t display tables onscreen.

Leaving table creation to a better carpenter, I next tried creating a link to another page on my site. In Notepad, I’d been forced to do this manually, by laboriously typing out an <A> tag. In PaddyPage, I clicked the icon of chains weighing down Atlas as he attempts to leap across the Mediterranean to do battle with Hercules, typed in the link’s text, clicked the Browse button, worked my way to the folder containing all of the relevant files, cancelled the whole operation, set up a "worksite" listing every page anywhere I might ever want to link to, clicked the icon of chains weighing down…you know, entered the text again, clicked browse, selected the page I wanted to link to in the first place, then deleted and retyped the URL because PaddyPage had gotten it wrong.

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I realized that there was only one way to create the Web site of my dreams. My fingers shaking with excitement, I went to PaddyPage and typed a determined Alt-F4. Then I did what I should have done all along. I launched Notepad.

After four days of no sleep and little food, I had the Web site of my dreams. Beautiful colors, scrolling tickertapes, frames, and VERML underwear, all laid out with a design as eloquent and simple as Hearst Castle. Swelling with pride, I sent it off to Janet, the Society president and final arbitrator of all things about silent film and Flemish dance.

Two days later I got a reply: "You know, I really prefer the plain text version."