If you've just registered a new domain name, you'll probably want to build a site to go with (if you haven't already). You don't need to be an experienced programmer to create a Web site. There are also plenty of free resources online to help you put together a top-notch set of pages. This article will get you on your way by introducing you to HTML (the code used to create Web pages), Web graphics, browser and platform considerations, and advanced Web features.
Once your site is up, you'll want to check out Promoting Your Site
to get it noticed.
HTML Code
Web pages don't just appear. They're built using a special programming language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer know how to interpret. The result is the pages that appear on your monitor.
When you're viewing a page in a browser, you can look at the page's HTML by selecting "View" and then "Source." (You can try it now, if you want.) When you view HTML, you'll notice that there are lots of angle brackets ("<" and ">"). HTML commands, also known as tags, are all about brackets. For example, "<p>" tells the browser to start a new paragraph; "<b>" tells the browser to bold some text . Type bracketed HTML commands around a bunch of text in a text editor (such as Notepad in Windows or SimpleText on a Mac) and you've got yourself a Web page.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were no more than a handful of these bracketed HTML commands. Pages were fairly simple, and you could use a simple text editor to create a web site. Today there are lot more HTML commands, and pages are often more complex. There are programs called Web editors that can write the HTML commands for you.
Web editors are the equivalent of word processors for Web pages. In a Web editor, you select a word and click a "Bold" button, and the editor writes out the HTML command for you. This keeps you from having to remember the dozens of different commands. Web editors range in price from free (Netscape Composer) to hundreds of pounds (Macromedia Dreamweaver).
Most word processors these days will also convert your documents into HTML. This isn't a bad place to start if you have nothing else, but the conversions aren't as good as writing pages in real Web editors.
JavaScript lets you to add simple interactive features to your Web pages. Fancy "roll over" buttons and customized pop-up browser windows are two popular JavaScript features. The great thing about JavaScript is that it lives inside your HTML page, so you can write it with a simple text editor. (If you view a page's source and see some code that looks a lot different that HTML, it's probably JavaScript.) HTML Goodies offers tutorials in JavaScript, and Web editors such as Dreamweaver can code JavaScript into your pages for you.
JavaScript isn't the same thing as Java. Java programs (known as "applets") exist separately from your Web page code, and are integrated into your pages by using an HTML command called <applet>. (Java is also a complete programming language that can be used independently of Web pages, but we won't go into that here.) You can find Java applets for your site at Gamelan.
Flash, a technology invented by Macromedia, is the new Web technology. Flash brings to the web the sort of animated, interactive content that you see in CD-ROM games. It lets you create full-screen, interactive animations that download quickly. Since many of the new browsers are shipping with the Flash plug-in installed, more and more people are able to enjoy Flash content. To get more information about Flash, visit the source -- the Flash page at Macromedia. Since Flash is proprietary, you have to buy special software to create Flash presentations.
Graphics
You may think that your product or riveting writing will be enough to keep people at your site. But it usually isn't. Putting some effort into creating attractive pages, with graphics that look nice and download fast, can really produce good results. You don't even have to be an artist to add graphics to a page.
You can obtain graphics for your site from a variety of sources: you can buy clip art packages at most software stores, scan photos or drawings with a low-cost scanner, or pick up a digital camera and shoot photos for your site yourself. There are lots of art available on the Web also that you can use free of charge. Scream Design maintains one of the most comprehensive free art sites around.
How can you use art that you find on the Web? Just as you can view the HTML of any page on the Web, you can download any image by right clicking it and choosing "Save Picture As." Of course, just because you can download it doesn't mean you can legally use it on your own pages. Always check with the web site you grabbed an image from to make sure the artwork is in the public domain. Once you've downloaded an image file, you add it to a page using the <img> HTML tag. (Web editors usually have shortcuts for inserting images into pages.)
There are two types of images that you'll use on your pages: JPEG files (which end in .jpg) and GIF files (which end in .gif). JPEG and GIF are known as compressed file formats because they shrink image information into tiny files that download fast (which is important on the Web). JPEGs support a greater number of colors than GIFs and are great for saving continuous-tone images such as photographs. GIFs excel at compressing flat-color art, and are great for illustrations that have a lot of solid colors. If you're creating graphics from scratch or optimizing images from a camera or scanner, it's good to bone up on some of the finer points of saving GIFs and JPEGs (see the links below).
The great thing about the Web is that it's based on open standards. Web pages are built with HTML (a standard formatting language) and are transmitted to browsers by HTTP (a standard networking protocol). These standards mean that different users on different computers all around the world can easily view the same Web pages.
Unfortunately, this universality doesn't completely carry over into browsers and operating systems. The two main Web browsers-- Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer -- sometimes display HTML commands differently. And some Web pages look different depending on whether you're viewing them on a Macintosh or a PC.
What this means for Web designers is that it's critical to check how pages look on a variety of browsers and platforms before putting a site live. Examining your pages in the latest versions of Netscape and Explorer on both a Mac and PC is a must. Viewing your pages on several older browsers (those that don't support the most recent HTML commands) is also a good idea.
There are work-arounds for browser and platform incompatibilities. As you get more HTML experience, you can learn ways of creating pages that "fail gracefully" in browsers that can't interpret certain HTML commands. For instance, there are ways to code HTML tables such that the information is still somewhat organized when they are viewed on older browsers that don't do tables. Another good HTML programming practice is to include descriptive ALT information for all of your images. This "alternate" information is displayed in browsers that can't view images or have images turned off.
Color is another issue to think about when creating pages. Some image-rich pages can look less than perfect on 256-color monitors. This is because browsers running on such monitors can only display the so-called "Web-safe" palette of 216 colors. If a pixel isn't Web safe, it gets converted to one that is. Fortunately, most computer systems now come with monitors that display thousands or millions of colors, and in such cases Web-safeness is not an issue. To learn more about using Web-safe colors, see the links below.
