HTML Tutorials

Part 2

Author: Derek Duban of www.upwithabang.com for how-to docs on web development and free plug-in services for your site.

For starters the 3 basic files used to make a web site are:

HTML files

HyperText Markup Language. These are the main files of your web site. They are read first and they refer to other files that should be included in showing your web page. They also contain the main content of your web site. So they may contain your article on pandas, references to images of pandas, and references to style sheets.

Style sheets

Formally called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These tell the browser how the information in your HTML file should look. They include information like colors and layout.

Image files

Images are displayed on a web page because references to them are included in the HTML file. The HTML file tells which image file to display at a particular point in a document.

For the most basic of web sites you only need HTML. HTML describes the content of your web page, ie: what the user reads. How a web page looks is described by a style sheet. Both of these file types are basic text files. This means they are very plain files that you can make using Windows NotePad (sorry, Mac users, I don't know what you people use).

So ignoring for now what the insides of an HTML file looks like, there are the steps involved in posting a web site:

• Open NotePad (or any plain text editor)
• Type in some HTML code
• Save file to a new folder
• Open another copy of NotePad
• Type in some style sheet code
• Save file to save folder as the HTML file
• Open a browser
• Open the HTML file in your browser (Menu->File->Open)
• If it looks good continue to next step
• Open FTP program
• Upload both files to server
• Open web page in browser

There are a lot of caveats to the items in the list above but that is the gist of it. And you'll do it over and over again with each page you develop. I did not mention image uploads since creating images is a huge separate topic that is beyond the scope of this article.

This article has been an overview of the web page development process. Actual code is covered in the next article.

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