Note that
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A website can be on Web, (the Internet) like http://yahoo.com or it could actually be on your own computer. When it’s on web, in order for it to be seen by others using their Internet Service Provider, it must be hosted. That is files which comprise website must be placed on a computer with an “always on” connection to Internet.
A Web site is just a place where a collection of web pages or html documents are located. There are around 16 million of them as of early 2003. You can design and setup a website of your own fairly easily in as little as a day or two. I am going to walk you through steps that you will need to follow, giving a little explanation along way.
If you can type a letter in Microsoft Word, you can be live on Web in 2 Days.
The Internet is just a giant network of computers all connected together so that they can share information with one another. Thirty four million of you are connected to that network by a modem in your computer, a telephone line connection to AOL’s computers and then through their connection to Internet. If you have a cable modem, or satellite modem, then no phone connection is needed.
Telephones and Internet
Telephones have been around for all your life. You don’t even think about how you can call local access telephone number to AOL. But Internet is much newer and you don’t understand modems and Internet Service Providers and bandwidth. Who cares, you don’t know that much about how your telephone calls are switched to get you to your final destination. You don’t have to understand how your connection to website you want to visit gets switched either. Actually today there is some merging of telephones calls and internet in that some voice and data phone calls are actually travelling over internet. But that’s another story.
So that’s how you would get to someone else’s website, but how would they get to one that you setup? Or what would you have to do to make your website available to others?
Create content, get hosted and tell others.
First if you have an idea for some information, graphics, pictures or sounds that you would like to place on a website of your own and have them available to others what would you have to do? Well, first you create content, whatever it is. Then you arrange to have it hosted and then just tell others how to find it.
Creating content on Web site pages. For most web sites, information is in form of a page containing text and probably a few graphics. It is much like a word processing document. They are created in a plain text file which is written using special coding called HTML. Hyper Text Markup Language is code in which html pages are written. It has various words and symbols that it calls tags. They are just special code words which are standard and which tell your Internet Explorer (for instance) browser how to display information and graphics on html page.
I am creating this html document using Microsoft Word. So for right now, I am doing nothing different. The difference was that when I asked Word to start a new document, I specified a new webpage. It’s File-New-Blank Web Page from main Word menu. And then you just type. You can use whatever menu choices are then showing on menu bar. You could insert a graphic, pictures, diagrams or a table, all from Word menu bar. You can format text to different fonts, make it bold, italic, underlined just as you can do in a word processing document.
So you probably have Microsoft Word or another competitors word processor. Word can create html documents and if you have a competitive product it probably can also. You can start to create pages that will make up your website. But there are some things that are not so obvious when working with a word processor. How do I get from one page to another and then back again or to yet a third page? It’s done with hyperlinks. A hyperlink is just a special word or phrase, that is usually bright blue in color and underlined which, when clicked on with your mouse loads a different part of that web page or loads a different web page. Back at top of this page when I typed Yahoo’s website address in it’s proper form, Microsoft Word recognized what it was and automatically made it into a hyperlink, and made it blue and underlined it. But here’s another one #Top of Document which takes you to top of this document. You create a hyperlink in Word from menu bar with command Insert- Hyperlink.
You can do a webpage in Word, but it has some limitations. The Microsoft application that is specifically created to design web pages is FrontPage. It is a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) html editor or webpage creator. Now it is set up for specific purpose of making web pages. But it has some other cool stuff that is going to make creating your web site really easy and once you learn a little, a whole lot of fun. There are other web page programs that are less expensive, maybe even free, those that are more expensive, maybe more powerful in certain ways and those that professionals use. But many professional web designers like FrontPage because it is powerful and similar to applications that users are already used to and because it is easy for a non-professional to take over and manage his website once pro has set it up for them. You can probably find a copy of Microsoft FrontPage 2002 for $50 or so on Amazon or Ebay. You may even have a copy on your computer that came with Office.
What is html and what do I have to know about it?
Its that code that tells internet browser how to display information and graphics that are on webpage. You can find html tags and some basic information about them in many places on internet. Just search for “html tutorial” in a search engine and you’ll probably get more information than you want to read. If you are using a wysiwyg editor, you probably don’t need to do much more that a quick read through of one of tutorials that you will find.
See how html works… go to Source.
