Creating your first Webpage
Part 1: HTML
People who are new to building and publishing a website invariably ask me "Where do I start?". I'm always sympathetic to the question because a new user has a number of different concepts that they need to be able to understand before they can successfully publish a site. This month I will provide a basic overview of some of the jargon and processes. Part 2 (August Newsletter) will discuss some of the web authoring tools that are currently available for users.
The first piece of advice I'll give is:
Don't be daunted by the process. Once you have done it once or twice it all makes sense!
Let's start at the beginning
A web page is actually a very simple thing. If you can construct a document in say Microsoft Word, then constructing a good quality webpage is definitely not out of your technical reach. The process we need to follow and I'll try to not jump around too much is:
- Create a page in an authoring tool
- Transfer the page you've created to a server
- Test the result and perform any maintenance required
HTML Explained
The first thing we need to do is create a webpage. A webpage is created in a programming language called HTML, this is an acronym for Hyper Text Mark-up Language. Sounds complex, however not only is it relatively basic but most authoring tools available today don't actually require you to understand HTML at all, it all happens behind the scenes. Having said that understanding the basic principles of HTML can make your life much easier!
HTML is a 'client' side language. What that means is that a .html file (in other words, a webpage) is simply a plain text file. When accessed by a web browser, the browser interprets the file and the page is displayed according to the way it's interpreted. This explains why sometimes a page might look different in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox or Safari. A HTML page comprises of the content you are publishing as well as a set of commands that the web browser uses to format the page’s display. A simple example of this is shown below:
<html>
<body>
<p>Hello World</p>
</body>
</html>
If this file were to be interpreted by a web browser, it would simply display "Hello World" on the screen. The first 'tags' <html> and <body> tell the browser firstly that the page is html and then where the content on the page begins. Remember, in all HTML you need to close each tag that you have opened. So <html> has a corresponding close tag </html>.
In the above example if we wanted the "Hello World" to be displayed in bold we'd simply place some 'bold' tags around the word and the line would become:
<p><strong>Hello World</strong></p>
The <strong> and </strong> tag tells the browser to display in bold anything between the two tags.
So that's the basic part of HTML. The nice thing about using a web authoring tool is that you don't need to add those <b> and </b> tags in, you simply highlight the text you want to bold, click the 'bold' button and the program will write the actual code in the background. At the same time displaying your text in bold on the screen.
You may have heard of a WYSIWYG editor. This is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. It's a complex looking bit of jargon that simply means, how your webpage looks on the screen (during creation) is what it is going to look like when you publish it.
So what are these WYSIWYG editors or web authoring tools?
Broadly there are 2 different types available for customers. The first are the programs that just like Microsoft Word which are installed on your computer. The second are installed on the server that you access via a web page.
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