Article Read. You Can Find All Kind of Articles

Home | Search Article

Search

-- All Categories --Auto and TrucksEducationFamilyFood and DrinkGadgets and GizmosHealthHobbiesHome ImprovementKids and TeensLegal MattersParentingPets and AnimalsRecreation and SportsSite PromotionTravel and LeisureWeb DevelopmentWomenWriting
Advanced Search

• Auto and Trucks
• Education
• Family
• Food and Drink
• Gadgets and Gizmos
• Health
• Hobbies
• Home Improvement
• Kids and Teens
• Legal Matters
• Parenting
• Pets and Animals
• Recreation and Sports
• Site Promotion
• Travel and Leisure
• Web Development
• Women
• Writing

---

Note that the online version of this article containsscreenshots that are helpful but could not be included inthis article. To view ithttp://dollarware.us/websitedesign.htm You need your computer, some software and a connection tothe Internet.A website can be on the Web, (the Internet) likehttp://yahoo.com or it could actually be on your owncomputer. When its on the web, in order for it to be seenby others using their Internet Service Provider, it must behosted. That is the files which comprise the website must beplaced on a computer with an always on connection to theInternet.A Web site is just a place where a collection of web pagesor html documents are located. There are around 16 millionof them as of early 2003. You can design and setup awebsite of your own fairly easily in as little as a day ortwo. I am going to walk you through the steps that you willneed to follow, giving a little explanation along the way.If you can type a letter in Microsoft Word, you can be live on the Web in 2 Days.The Internet is just a giant network of computers allconnected together so that they can share information withone another. Thirty four million of you are connected tothat network by a modem in your computer, a telephone lineconnection to AOLs computers and then through theirconnection to the Internet. If you have a cable modem, orsatellite modem, then no phone connection is needed.Telephones and the InternetTelephones have been around for all your life. You donteven think about how you can call the local access telephonenumber to AOL. But the Internet is much newer and you dontunderstand modems and Internet Service Providers andbandwidth. Who cares, you dont know that much about howyour telephone calls are switched to get you to your finaldestination. You dont have to understand how yourconnection to the website you want to visit gets switchedeither. Actually today there is some merging of telephonescalls and the internet in that some voice and data phonecalls are actually travelling over the internet. But thatsanother story.So thats how you would get to someone elses website, buthow would they get to one that you setup? Or what would youhave 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 websiteof your own and have them available to others what would youhave to do? Well, first you create the content, whatever itis. Then you arrange to have it hosted and then just tellothers how to find it.Creating the content on Web site pages.For most web sites, the information is in the form of a pagecontaining text and probably a few graphics. It is much likea word processing document. They are created in a plain textfile which is written using special coding called HTML.Hyper Text Markup Language is the code in which html pagesare written. It has various words and symbols that it callstags. They are just special code words which are standardand which tell your Internet Explorer (for instance) browserhow to display the information and graphics on the htmlpage.I am creating this html document using Microsoft Word. Sofor right now, I am doing nothing different. The differencewas that when I asked Word to start a new document, Ispecified a new webpage. Its File-New-Blank Web Page fromthe main Word menu. And then you just type. You can usewhatever menu choices are then showing on the menu bar. Youcould insert a graphic, pictures, diagrams or a table, allfrom the Word menu bar. You can format the text to differentfonts, make it bold, italic, underlined just as you can doin a word processing document.So you probably have Microsoft Word or another competitorsword processor. Word can create html documents and if youhave a competitive product it probably can also. You canstart to create the pages that will make up your website.But there are some things that are not so obvious whenworking with a word processor. How do I get from one page toanother and then back again or to yet a third page? Itsdone with hyperlinks. A hyperlink is just a special word orphrase, that is usually bright blue in color and underlinedwhich, when clicked on with your mouse loads a differentpart of that web page or loads a different web page. Back atthe top of this page when I typed Yahoos website address inits proper form, Microsoft Word recognized what it was andautomatically made it into a hyperlink, and made it blue andunderlined it. But heres another one #Top of the Documentwhich takes you to the top of this document. You create ahyperlink in Word from the menu bar with the command Insert-Hyperlink.You can do a webpage in Word, but it has some limitations.The Microsoft application that is specifically created todesign web pages is FrontPage. It is a wysiwyg (what you seeis what you get) html editor or webpage creator. Now it isset up for the specific purpose of making web pages. But ithas some other cool stuff that is going to make creatingyour web site really easy and once you learn a little, awhole lot of fun. There are other web page programs that areless expensive, maybe even free, those that are moreexpensive, maybe more powerful in certain ways and thosethat the professionals use. But many professional webdesigners like FrontPage because it is powerful and similarto applications that users are already used to and becauseit is easy for a non-professional to take over and managehis website once the pro has set it up for them. You canprobably find a copy of Microsoft FrontPage 2002 for $50 orso on Amazon or Ebay. You may even have a copy on yourcomputer that came with Office.What is html and what do I have to know about it?Its that code that tells the internet browser how to displaythe information and graphics that are on the webpage. Youcan find the html tags and some basic information about themin many places on the internet. Just search for htmltutorial in a search engine and youll probably get moreinformation than you want to read. If you are using awysiwyg editor, you probably dont need to do much more thata quick read through of one of the tutorials that you willfind.See how html works go to the Source.Another way to see, in the real world, what the html codedpage and the page as displayed by your browser is to dothis. Pick a simple website that you normally visit and gothere in your browser. Now with your mouse, right click on ablank part of the page. You should get a popup menu, choose,View Source. Another window will open and display the htmlsource code that is being used to display that page in yourbrowser. You can actually copy that code and save it as afile on your computer. If you save it with the properextension .htm or .html, then using My Computer to view thecontents of the directory where the file is saved. If youdouble click on the file name, it will start your internetbrowser and load that document into it and it will seem thatyou have gone to that previously visited website.So whats different about visiting a site on the web instead of the one on my computer?Not much difference at all, except that the page that youwill first see is on another computer at some unknown to youlocation. And that some how your browser must find thatcomputer and asked it to send a copy of that page over theinternet to your computer where it eventually arrives loadedinto your browser. Exactly how all that happens is anotherstory, but basically, your browser sends a request for apage whose location is really given in the address or URL(Uniform Resource Locator) that you typed into your browser.The request goes outside through your Internet ServiceProvider to a nameserver computer and asks what path itshould take to send the command to the webserver. All thishappens automatically, kind of like when you dial a phonenumber, but not exactly that way. Anyway the request for thewebpage finally finds its way to the webserver on which theweb page is stored. The webserver receives the request andsends the data contained in the html document back over thepath through the internet and back to your computer where itis delivered and read by your browser which properlydisplays it for you. All this happens in seconds!Getting HostedNow, you create the html documents using whatever programyou choose. But your computer is not a webserver. Awebserver is a computer with special programs which canreceive and act on commands to deliver a webpage to anothercomputer. It finds the page that was requested and sends itout over the internet back to the requesting computer. Youcould make your computer a webserver by installing theproper programs and making the connection to the internet.But the normal way for most of us is to arrange for webhosting from a company who offers that service to the publicfor a fee. There is a full range of hosting packages withvarious features and from free to expensive. An average fora reliable, full featured package will probably be in the$20 to $25 a month range.Once that service is arranged you are told what their URL isso that you can know how to send the html documents that youcreated to the webserver computer. Most of the time this isaccomplished by using an FTP (file transfer protocol)program which acts like a translator and sends the pagesfrom your computer to the webserver. A username and passwordsetup allows your access to your space on the webserver andprevents others from gaining access to your files. It canget a little confusing when you use FTP. Thats why I preferand recommend that you use a program where the FTP isbuilt-in to the html editor.FrontPage is a wysiwyg html editor with built-in FTPFrontPage has this FTP program (actually Word has it too)built into it and uses it to send and receive html documentto and from your computer. You only have to use one programand believe me, its going to save you a lot of aggravationover dealing with two. So remember when you are comparingprices of html editors and whether or not they have a builtin FTP or require a separate one. You can get a free one ora free trial of one, if you search.But of course many of you have Microsoft Word so just typeup a little page, click on the menu bar File SaveAsNotice the slashes instead of backslashes in the file namebox and notice that the address of the website is addedbefore the file name in that same box, the Save as type isset to Web Page. Now click the Save button and if you haveworked through this carefully Word will send this document(web page) to your website.To see if the transfer worked, just enter the same addressthat was in the File name box into your browser and itshould retrieve the document from your site and display it.How about domain names?Oh, you dont have to have your own domain name to have awebsite on a webserver somewhere else. You can use thedomain name owned and hosted by someone else. Geocities isan example of this. You use their domain name with somevariation such as a subdomain or a subdirectory. Heres anof example.http://www.geocities.com/dollarwareinc/howto.html Domain names and email accounts.In most cases, though, you think of a domain name that youwould like to own and you go to a Domain Name Registrarsweb site and do a search to see if that name is available.If it is you pay a fee and get exclusive rights to thatdomain name for a given period of time usually one or twoyears. Prices vary quite a bit. Ive seen them as low as $8or $9 for one year to $65 for two years. For less than $10(ten dollars) you can get a domain name, and get 5 emailaccounts. Even if you dont get a hosting account. You canhave the email forwarded to your regular email box. But theemail address will be at the domain name you have chosen, john@moneymaker.com for instance.Ok, now that you have the domain name, you need to also tellthe registrar where you will be hosting your web site. Yougive them the address of the hosting companys nameservers(usually two of them) . The name servers addresses will havenames like other web sites. Something like this: Nameserver 1 ns.my-ehost.com Nameserver 2 ns2.my-ehost.comYou give this information to the registrar, usually by justtyping it into a special form on their website. You usuallyfind it under something like Manage Your Domain. Theregistrar then, will send this information, the name of yournew domain and where it can be found to all the other nameservers on the Internet. Actually new information istransferred from one connecting device (Routers) to anotherautomatically until it is said to have propagatedthroughout the internet. This just means that anyone can nowfind your website by typing its address into their browsers. This propagation process takes from 24 to 48 hours tocomplete.Youre done. That is, you have your web sites html pagescreated, you have them uploaded to the webserver. You havea domain name which becomes the address of the site.Now just tell the World about your new website.

About the Author

John Wilson, BSIM, A+, Network+, CCNA, MCSA. Webmaster for http://website-how-to.com offering help to those who want to create and setup their own site.