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Web sites are related collections of images or other files that are accessible through a Web browser program. Although navigating the World Wide Web with a browser is a useful skill, mastering just a few more basic concepts enables you to create and publish your own Web pages. You can create Web pages by learning Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language upon which all Web pages are based. Before you begin, you must plan your Web site and write its contents so that it conforms to specific standards. You can then publish those pages on the Web so others can view them.
When learning how to code in HTML, it is often quite useful to learn how to hand-code in a text editor such as Notepad before jumping into an editing program. If you use a program to do all the work for you, you will have a much harder time learning all of the different tags and how to use them. There are more editors out there than just Notepad, too. If you are comfortable with text editors and wish to use a WYSIWYG program, there are many different kinds available. Three possible programs are Microsoft Expression Web, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Amaya. Each has its ups and downs, but for this course (BE 170), we will be using Expression Web.
Once you've made the decision to make a website, but before you begin making it, make sure you've decided what kind of website you want to make, what your target audience will be, and gather information you wish to present to be placed on it. Your last step is to decide how you want to present this information to the audience.
Once you've done all of that, your next step is to design a site map, and settle on a page layout - how you will organize the pages of the site and how you want things to be displayed on said website. Having a site map is essential, especially for larger websites, as visitors who know what they want but not where to find it can simply view the map and go directly to it. Page Layouts are important for those who are hard of sight and must use screen readers as well as for the visual presentation.
Now that you know how you want it to look, it's time to start building it. Create all of the pages and add the info and media that you wish, and save your work to your disk drive. But before we can go on to the final step, make sure you test your site - do the internal links work between pages? Do jump links work? If it doesn't work on your hard drive or storage device, it won't work on the internet either - remember that!
Once the site is designed and built, it's time to put it out on the web for the world to see - if it can find it. Many places you will upload the files via FTP, other places have uploaders or support uploading directly from the HTML editor itself, such as with Expression Web. Once it's up, be sure to submit the link to your site to the various search engines who will then crawl the site and add its pages to their database. Once they've done that, your site will turn up in search results!
Page modified on November 25, 2008