Creating a Web Page I : What You Need
Created | Updated Sep 15, 2002
This is the first instalment in a series of entries on how to create your own web page. This tutorial is designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible. No matter what your skill level with computers, you can learn to create a web page. It's easier than many people suspect, and it's fun!
In order to create a webpage, you need a few basic tools and ingredients:
- First, you need HTML.
- A text editor or HTML editor is the program used to write the HTML.
- You'll also need images, backgrounds, fonts, colours, possibly sound, and other goodies to spice up your site.
- You need WS_FTP or Fetch to move the files from wherever you store them (a disk or your hard drive) to the host computer.
- The host is a powerful computer capable of handling many connections. This is the computer that stores your site so that others can view it.
HTML stands for Hypertext Mark-up Language. "Hypertext" is the text, images, sound files, etc that you want to display, and "mark up language" means that these are the commands that tell the browser how to display it. HTML is not a programming language in the strictest sense of the word. Programming languages talk directly to the computer's brain, the central processing unit (CPU), and give the CPU instructions. HTML talks not to the CPU but to the browser (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer).
Text editors are just very simple word processing programs, such as WordPad or Simpletext. The advantages of using a text editor are that you have total control over the HTML, the resulting file tends to be compatible with almost anything, and it's very easy to find a cheap program or use the one that comes with your computer. The disadvantages of using a text editor are that it's slower since you type everything out by hand, and you can't always organize your HTML tags by colours to make them easier to read.
An HTML editor1 is like a word processor on the surface, but while you're typing ordinary text, the program is creating the HTML for you in the background. This saves a lot of time, since typing the same HTML tags over and over is tedious, and you can organize the tags by colours to make them easier to keep track of. They also contain useful tools such as checking for broken links in your site, spellcheckers, etc. Examples of editors are Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and GoLive. Despite their advantages, HTML editors aren't perfect so they will sometimes make mistakes in their HTML, and sometimes the files they create are not universally compatible with other editors or even other browsers. It can take a while to learn a particular editor’s interface (how to do what), and the interface will vary from one editor to the next so knowing one doesn’t mean you will necessarily pick up another easily.
In short, editors can be great time-savers, but it helps to understand what they're doing in the background in order to fix any mistakes and be able to use them to their full potential. This article will also give you a basic rundown of HTML tags and syntax (the way you have to phrase commands).
There will more tips later on in other articles about how to add these and where to find them.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the common language of sorts that computers on the Internet use to move files from one computer to another. WS_FTP is a program for PCs and can be downloaded off of Ipswitch's site. Fetch is the Mac version of it. (Most HTML editors will have a file transfer feature built in.)
There are several hosting options, each with advantages and disadvantages.
A plethora of free web-based hosts exists. All contain some amount of advertising (either a banner, a toolbar, or a pop-up window). Some of them deactivate your account after a certain period of inactivity, others let you keep the account indefinitely. The amount of space they allow you varies from one host to the next. To comparison shop, go to Free Web Space for a listing of over 400 hosts comparing these features. When you sign up with a host you will be asked for a contact email address, possibly a snail mail address, and you will have to accept their Terms of Service agreement. Read over the ToS agreement carefully before you accept to get an idea of what your responsibilities (and theirs!) are, and what that host considers "appropriate use" of their services.
Paid hosts and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) also are an option. These include AOL, Prodigy, MSN, and others. Prices vary, but since you are paying for the hosting there is no advertising put in your page. You can keep the account for as long as you keep paying them. The amount of space offered can vary, but it is often unlimited. Compare Web Hosts will let you search by many different criteria, including price, storage space, what advanced features they have/support, etc.
Finally, the browser mentioned before is simply the program that displays webpages. The two most popular are Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but there are many others. These days browsers are often available for free download, or they come with the computer.
