MakeOwnWebsite.net

About

The original idea of the book was to circulate among family and friends as I didn’t have time to deal with all their requests for basic websites especially since I was not getting paid for it.

So I created this book and whenever a family or friend asked me to do them a basic website I responded with “I can help you to do it yourself”.

Well it worked out great. I had more time to do work I was getting paid for, they found the book really helpful and 15 out of the 17 people I gave the book to produced their own sites (yes they were basic but they were happy THEY had done it)!!!

The book has obviously had a bit of a facelift since I originally did it. For example I corrected a few appalling spelling mistakes although I bet you still find some.

Anyway something about the book now.

Over the last year I have chopped and changed the book to try and explain things in the best possible way and from the feedback I have had it is easily understood and easy to follow.

The book is separated into 12 sections each dealing with a different area

On most sections there are exercises to complete at the end, which are relevant to whatever has been learnt in the section. It is very important to try and complete these exercises as they basically test your knowledge and understanding of the section.

I have also assumed that the reader has very little knowledge of how things work so to those of you who are more advanced and know a little more I apologise.

I would also recommend that for the book you use internet explorer even if it is not your default browser. The reason being is that most of the examples were done using IE and results may differ in other browsers.

There are some sections in this book that I only touch upon briefly. This is because this book was designed to be a basic guide to web design not an in depth guide. The aim was to enable people to produce their own basic website after using this book.

I think that’s enough of an introduction I am sure you want to get started so why don’t you move to the first section.



Section 1   Edit, Name And Save Files

Section 2    Headings, Alignment And Formatting

Section 3    Text And Background Colours

Section 4    Working With Images

Section 5    Linking Your Pages

Section 6    Formatting Page Content

Section 7    Layouts With Tables

Section 8    Collecting Input From Users

Section 9    Working With Frames

Section 10    Style Sheets

Section 11    Multimedia

Section 12    JavaScript

Extras

How To Edit, Name and Save Files

The Great Thing about HTML is that in order to create pages you don’t need any special program like you do in things such as software developing. Web pages can be designed in something as simple as notepad that comes with windows.

There are alternatives out there to notepad such as Textpad (pc). Textpad is shareware that can be downloaded from http://www.textpad.com/. Below is a task you can do yourself that will get you on your way to creating your first webpage follow the instructions below.

Task

For those of you who have never seen HTML Source code before open any webpage in internet explorer and go to View then go to Source you will see notepad open and show you the source code for the page.

If you haven’t already done so open notepad on your computer you will be presented with a new blank document. You can minimize this for now.

Each Web page contains commands that tell the web browser what to do and how to display information.

These commands are called tags.

HTML tags are surrounded by the angle brackets < and >.

It is always good practice to try and enter all tags in uppercase it makes your HTML code easier to read should you need to update it later. e.g.. .

Every Webpage has a structure. The basic structure starts with the tag this basically tells the browser that everything after this will be written in HTML. Next comes the tag. Inside the head tag you may have a title tag

What this basically tells the browser is to open the title tag it takes the title and then it closes the title as if to say I have finished with the title now. You can get away with not closing some tags but this is very very bad HTML coding and will not only make code very hard to read and messy it could also affect many other things such as where you rank in search engines etc

Ok its time to create our first webpage in the exercise below:

Type the code below into the open notepad document you have:

Anything I want to be displayed on the screen goes in this Section

After you have typed the above into Notepad:

If you now go to the place where you saved the file and double click the file firstpage.htm you should see a new browser window with the page title you gave it and some text in the main window.

As a quick recap:

tells the browser that everything after this line will be written in the HTML language.

is the section at the beginning of every web page that you can use to create individual display styles.