WWW Site Development Basics

There are lots of reasons to create a web page or site:

No matter what information is posted on your page, always keep your audience in mind.

Once your Web page is "posted" or published, remember to keep it up to date.

Introduction

There are many facets to creating a WWW (World Wide Web) page or site.

Creating a WWW page/site is similar in concept to doing a research paper, creating a proposal or writing a story. There are a series of steps to follow when creating the site.

Site Development Steps

Regardless of whether you develop one page/site or 100, do the page/site development in manageable phases to your skill level.

Site development is a "black hole" -- it never ends! You will always find new things to add to your page/site and ways to improve your page or site.

Web Page/Site Planning

It is important to take time in planning your WWW page/site before you begin designing and developing it. Planning in the beginning will help avoid headaches caused by changes during the development phase.

Remember to plan according to your experience.  If you are a beginning developer, KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid!

Plan and develop your web page/site in phases and keep the page/site flexible in design so that you can make changes easily in the future.

Planning a Good WWW Site

Providing content to your site is the most important part of site development. Without content, people have no reason to visit your site. Provide "cool" items only if they enhance your site.

Develop your site for a particular audience and don't forget about them.

Applications to Use

The two most popular browsers are
Netscape Communicator/Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Other browsers exist however.

What is a browser?

A browser (or Web browser) is a piece of software written for a very specific purpose: it loads files from remote locations, interprets the coding in the files, and draws Web pages on your computer's screen based on the interpretation. A browser is a sort of "translator" that makes sense out of the documents on the World-Wide Web.

There are three ways to create your home page:
  1. Learn Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the building block of the Web.

    In very basic, very layman terms, you can think of the HTML code on a web page as little more than a list of commands surrounding whatever text will be on the web page. It tells your browser program what goes where, which directories, or folders, to go to get all of the different components needed to create and display the web page, and in what order, color, size, etc. to display them.

    Luckily for the majority of us, there is no longer a need to learn HTML in order to create a web page. Today, there are some very good web page building programs where you only need to have a basic understanding of what HTML is, and know that your web pages will be HTML pages. All of the text, images, or sound files that you want to put on a page will be embedded into an HTML page.

  2. Use a Web Page editor.
  3. Pay a professional to do it for you.

It is recommended you try the first two.

HTML Editors

There are many programs available for creating and modifying HTML files. They can be text editors, word processors or applications created specifically for HTML development.

Image Editors

The two primary image file types used on the Web are JPEG and GIF. Most image editing programs support these formats.

Researching Site Content

Many images that can be used on your WWW page/site are available on the Internet. Find images that will be consistent with your site design and "attitude".

Look at other WWW pages for ideas on how you can organize your web page/site as well as content ideas.

What is a Web page?

A Web page is a single document that can contain any number of different elements: text, graphics, links, tables, etc.

These elements are placed on the page using a special language, called HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language). HTML describes how all of the elements on the page should be displayed on your computer screen.

HTML is what's know as a "platform-independent" language because it can be interpreted on many different kinds of computers. Programmers write browsers for each different kind of computer or operating system. For many brands of computers, there are a number of different browsers.

Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer are Web browsers. They do essentially the same things, but sometimes accomplish them in different ways.

What is a home page?
A home page is really just a Web page. People usually refer to the first page people see on their site as their "home" page.

Designing and Creating

This is the most time consuming.

Basic Design Hints

Use JPEG files for photos and pictures with many colors. The compression algorithm used yields better results for these image types than GIF.

GIF files are for simple images and for images that need transparent backgrounds. GIF images can be no more than 256 colors.

Web Site Basics

When designing the web page/site, don't forget some of the "basics" that are needed for a site. Some people become caught up with parts of their WWW web page/site that they forget to include such simple information such as ways to contact the site developers.

What is a Web site?

A Web site is a collection of Web pages with some unifying theme. Perhaps the pages all belong to the same person or company, or perhaps they are all about the same topic. The definition is loose, but usually when people talk about a "site" they are referring to a number of Web pages that have something in common.

Publishing the WWW Site

Use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Programs

Fundamentals of FTP Using "FTP Packages"

Basic Elements of WS_FTP LE:

Try using "WS_FTP", "WS_FTP LE"  or "CUTE FTP"

You must publish the site to a World Wide Web server for people to view your work.

When selecting your WWW host, you need to consider costs, availability, flexibility, and functionality. Consider server capabilities such as server side includes, CGI applications, search engines, "hit" reporting, FrontPage 98/2000 extensions, etc.

WWW Server

Allows people to view your site.

How do Web pages get to my computer?

If you're on the Web and want to look at a specific Web page, you type that page's URL (Uniform Resource Locator) into your browser. A few seconds later, the page appears. But where does it come from?

The URL of a page is just a description of where that page is on the Web. When you type the URL into your browser, the browser sends a request for the document to the appropriate server (the server's name is part of the URL you type in). When the server receives the request, it looks for the document and, if it finds it, "serves" the document back to your computer. Your browser then reads and interprets the document, drawing the appropriate text, images, etc. on your screen.

Marketing the Site

For people to find your site, you must market it on the Internet and in other media.

Many search engines will allow you to register your site for free. You can also find sites and programs that will register your site to numerous search engines easily and for free. 

Here are some Search Engines:

AltaVista  -    http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl

Canada.com - http://www.canada.com/search/web/addurl.asp

Excite    -       http://www.excite.com/Info/add_url.html

Fast Search - http://www.ussc.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3

Go Network/Infoseek  - http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html

Google   -    http://www.google.com/addurl.html

HotBot    -    http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp

Lycos      -    http://lycos.com/addasite.html

MSN        -    http://search.msn.com/addurl.asp 

Northern Light -  http://www.nlsearch.com/docs/register.htm

WebCrawler - http://webcrawler.com/Help/GetListed/AddURLS.html

Reviewing the Site

More Information

Sample Site Consisting of Four (4) Pages 

Art By Ruth Heppler

http://www.always-online.com/ruthheppler/default.htm
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Last Updated on - Saturday, October 14, 2006 02:25 PM