To create a new page in Netscape's composer, start up Netscape, go to file, new, blank page.

Keywords.  They have to be one word or two word phrases separated by a comma.  Robots go around from the search engines and you stand a better chance of being picked up if your keywords are set up right.  You don't have to bother with the Meta Tags tab.  What you do have to watch is repeating a word or phrase in Keywords.  Let's say you have a graphic site and list the keywords as: graphic images, graphic tutorials, grahic tips, graphic links......well.....you have used the word grahic to death.  Robots are keyed to automatically reject meta tags that repeat some things over and over.  Find another way to say your keywords:  graphic website, jpg, gif, animation, PSP tubes, tutorials, photos, original art, image design, web design....

I think you get it.  Be creative but careful with your Meta Tags.  If they do a search on your page and do not find the subject there, you will also get rejected for that.

The next image is from the colors & background tab.  I set the text to be black, and I changed the followed link color to a lighter purple than first shows up.  This automatically changes all the link colors.  For many pages these colors will work fine.

Now, since I knew what image/background I was going to use, I went ahead and picked the background color too.  Sometimes you have to wait until you actually get the background up, then go back to page properties to pick a color to match.  Why use a background color?  It looks a lot better that the plain gray that will come up first if you don't choose a color.  If you want to change any of the color choices, just click once and it brings up the Color Palatte.  If you don't see anything there you like, click on Other at the bottom of the palatte and add a custom one you like.

Ok....let me discuss a few important things here.  You DO want to pick your choice of text color on the page properties.  Doing this instead of using the font color picker on the toolbar to define the color of your text will save excess html coding.  The only time you should use the color picker on the tool bar is when you want a word or phrase to be a different color than the text color you assigned on page properties.

Make sure you pick linking and followed link colors that are different from your text color, and that they show up well on the background you are using.  The active link is usually red.  There are times when this won't be the case.  On some of my Christmas pages the backgrounds were bright red.  So, my link colors looked like Christmas lights.  Bright blue, bright green, bright yellow, etc.

When you do pick the background color that will go under a background image, be careful of the choice of color.  If you have used a background that is basically made up of dark colors, pick the background color to be dark.  That color loads before the background image.  So your text on that page was probably a light color.  If you chose a light background color, then people couldn't read your text while waiting for the background image to load.  In this case, the background image I am using has a lot of light green and white in it, so my background color will be pale green.
 

This covers everything you do when you first setup your page.  Now that the basics are in place you can begin adding text, images, links, etc.