GeoCities Online Help Guide

Note: If you are having trouble signing up, please go to the Signup Trouble Page

Signing up for a free GeoCities home page.

1. Choose the Neighborhood that you want to move into.
Before you sign up for your Free Home Page, you first must find the neighborhood that suits your particular tastes and interests. In GeoCities, you will find a directory of all of our neighborhoods in the Homestead Directory.
From there, choose the neighborhood which best matches the theme of the Home Page you want to create.

2. Enter a neighborhood and look around for a vacancy.
Once you have clicked on your chosen neighborhood, you will be brought to the main page of that neighborhood. Here you will see links to Featured Homesteader Pages, Chat, Birthdays, Forums, and more.
STOP! Don't worry about all of these links for now!
At the upper middle of the page you will see three links labeled "Browse Great Pages Here," "Join This Neighborhood," and "Visit Our Commercial Sponsors."

To explore your neighborhood, click "Browse Great Pages Here."
Note: If you are already familiar with the neighborhoods, you can just click "Join This Neighborhood."
For information on starting a Commercial Page, click here.

3. Choose a Neighborhood Block
On the next page, you will see a list of all of the "blocks" in your chosen neighborhood.

Each one of the block numbers represents "100" seperate GeoCities Home Pages. You can click on any of the numbers to enter that block and explore. To find a vacant address in one of the blocks though, it is a good idea to click on one of the higher numbered blocks. These usually have more vacancies since they were added more recently.
Note: If you have trouble finding a vacant address, return to the main neighborhood page and click the "Join This Neighborhood" button. This will take you to the "GeoCities Vacancy Locator."

5. Choose an Address
Next you will come to a page that lists 50 Homesteads in a vertical fashion.

From this you can see the status of the Homestead, the Member Name of the owner, the Address, and maybe a description.

To find a vacant Homestead, you need to find an Address with a "vacant" sign.

If you don't see any vacancies, you can jump to another 50 homesteads in that neighborhood by clicking on one of these controls.

Or you can even jump to another neighborhood:

When you find a vacant address that you would like to move into, click on the address number under the "vacant" sign.

This will take you to the Application Form. Your Homestead address will already be filled out. Be extra careful when typing in your E-mail address! This is where GeoCities will send you your Welcome Letter and Password.

If you have trouble finding a vacant address, go back to the main neighborhood page and click "Join This Neighborhood." This will take you to the "Vacancy Locator."

What next?

After you have received your Password, you are then able to use the File Manager to create your Personal Home Page. For a simple step-by-step guide to teach you how to start your Home Page, click here.

If you already have files to upload, you can submit your custom Home Page and GIFs/JPGs using the EZ File Upload which can be found in the File Manager, or by FTP.

More Help
For questions about getting started in Geocities, please visit the Getting Started Help forum.