Web and Page Design
Getting Started With Your Web Site
Perhaps you have created a Web site in the past and are now ready for the next step in Web design. Or Maybe, you always wanted to build your first site but do not know the first step to start.
Knowing the Lingo and Basics
However, knowing the Lingo and the Basics is the first place to start. Anytime you start doing something new, one challenge is picking up the lingo or terminology. The Web has so many new terms floating around every day thay you can easily pick up some terms. You may also find that other, more techie concepts or technologies go right over your head. So please continue to read to make sure that you are on the right track.
Navigating the Web
A Web site is a collection of pages, usually formatted in HTML, (Hyper Text Markup Language), that contains text, graphics, and multimedia elements, as audio and video files. The main page of a site is known as a home page, which links to other documents in the site by using hyper-links. All these pages are stored on a Web server, which is the name for a computer that hosts the site.
Creating and Publishing a Web site
When you create a Web site, you work with HTML documents. The HTML, tag-based programming language is used for presenting information. It intermixes content with instructions for how and where to present it on the page. These pages with an HTML or .htm extension are viewed differently depending on the software you use to view them. When you view your document on a text editor like Notepad all you see ia a weird looking code. However, a browser knows what all these instrucions mean and can transfer the document to a presentable page.
Adding Graphics and Other Media Files
If you are used on working with Microsoft Word or other word processors, you probably added a graphic image to a document. When you add graphics and images to a document, it embeds a copy of the graphic from its original file into the document. Documents display graphics, video, and other media as content, but this media is never stored iside the HTML file. The document links to external image file for Flash media. The Web site includes not only HTML, documents but also any other media file that you add to your page.
Publishing you Web Site
When you are done creating your Web site, you publish your files to you Web site hosting server. If you are creating this pages on your own computer, publishing involves uploading all the HTML, graphic, and other media files. When the files have been successfully added to the Web server, the Web site is considered live, or open for all the world to view.
