Building your Home Page
This page discusses some of the basic information about creating a Web page, and guides you to other, more complete resources and tools to help you get going.
Page Building 101
Creating a home page can be a simple process, as easy as typing up a document in a word processing program. Because we don't directly support creating your site, we're unable to take you step by step through the process of creating a Web page.
Nonetheless, we do care, and want to see you take advantage of the services we have to offer. So, we've put together this document here to help you figure out where to start. Read on...
Pardon my HTML
Web pages are created and coded in the language known as HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Being a markup language means that the "code" is used simply to "mark up" the text in the document. This code is used to perform certain appearance functions and sets up how things appear.
HTML is read by the Web browser straight down from the top. Things are laid out on your screen beginning from what appears at the top of the document down to the end.
The raw code of an HTML document is known as the "source code", which we'll refer to as the "source" in the remainder of this document.
HTML is done in plain text, so you can use any program that reads and saves plain text files, even Windows Notepad, to create Web pages. At the bottom of this page are some links to popular HTML-authoring software, for those of you who want to keep it simple.
Tag - you're it!
HTML commands are put in the form of "tags" in the document, tagging whatever is being specified. Some tags are just placed within the document and stand alone, like image tags, or line breaks.
Here, we show a few examples, that are color-coded so they're easier to read. Blue is the actual tag, red is the name of each option we specify in our examples, and green is the actual data specified.
In an HTML document, you might find a <br> thrown in which would cause a line break to occur. A line break forces anything after it to appear starting on the next line.
Inside an HTML document, you might see something like this specifying the information about an image:
<img src="picture.gif" width="200" height="175">
That would insert an image titled "picture.gif", with a width of 200 pixels, a height of 175 pixels into the Web page.
Now, other tags need to be opened and closed. The closing of a tag is the tag with a slash (/) in front of it. If you wanted to bold just a few words in a sentence, you might put it in a bold tag like this:
Johnny walked all the way to the store just to find out that he left his money <b>at home</b>.
This would be displayed like this:
Johnny walked all the way to the store just to find out that he left his money at home.
Font tags are also used to specify fonts. If you look through the source code of this document, you'll see font tags that look like this:
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">text goes here</font>
That tag causes the text within the font tag to be shown at size 2 (10pt), with the Verdana font. It also shows that if Verdana is not installed on the user's computer, to use Arial instead, and then Helvetica if even Arial isn't there.
Putting it all together
Tags, as you've just learned, specify how the browser displays the contents of a page. One Web page can have all kinds of formatting and display specs, and also have images and objects inserted - all via tags.
To see a basic Web page created in Notepad, click here. To see the source code for it, click here.
Don't worry, you don't need to learn to do all that just to make a Web page, you can use what's called a "WYSIWYG" (pronounced "wiss-ee-wig") editor to make life easier, which most people these days do.
WYSI-what?
Well, you now are a bit familiar with HTML, how it works, etc. And, you probably don't want to deal with all that technical stuff from the start, and just get to making pages the easy way. Well, you're not alone.
It's good to know HTML code, and we strongly encourage you to become familiar with it. Still, the best way to get started is really just to use a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get". In a WYSIWYG editor, you can create and edit pages visually, just as easily as you might do word processing.
There are a lot of really powerful software packages out there. The most powerful and widely used packages are Microsoft FrontPage 2000 ($149), Microsoft FrontPage Express (Free, included with certain installs of Internet Explorer 4.0 or later), Netscape Composer (Free, and included with Netscape Communciator Suite), Allaire HomeSite (~$99), and Adobe Go Live ($300).
Getting help
There are also a great number of sites to help you research and implement technologies to make your Web site better and more active. While the type of Web space we're providing to you may only allow for certain types of technologies to be used, that doesn't mean you're left in the dust as far as making good-looking and well-functioning Web sites goes.
Here are several sites you can take advantage of to start building great Web pages using various technologies:
HTML Goodies - a great guide to get started with designing Web pages, resources for doing more advanced tasks, and a whole variety of other Web development items
C|NET's Builder.com - an all around reference for Web site creators and designers that makes it easy to take advantage of what amazing things you can do on the Web. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, you can learn something here.
Web Developer Magazine - lots of resources on various technologies here ranging from HTML to Java
Webreference.com - another big site with lots of juicy information that focuses on everything from beginner to expert site design
