Step 0: Dreamweaver CS3 Tutorial
Introduction to building a website
[This is Step 0 of the Dreamweaver CS3 Tutorial]
1 The big picture
The first thing you need to understand is how your web site fits within the “big picture” of the Internet. Creating a website is only part of the process.
You will also need a web host to publish your pages to. For the complete beginner, a web host is (loosely speaking) a company which has computers that are permanently connected to the Internet. After you design your web page(s), you will need to transfer – publish or upload – your pages to your web host’s computer, called a web server, so that the rest of the world can see it. There are numerous web hosts around – you can find a list of cheap web hosts on the internet.
The other people who are on the Internet can then connect to the Web Server to view the site. You use software called browsers, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer, to connect to and display pages of information supplied by remote servers.
2 What is HTML?
HTML stands for Hypertext Mark-up Language. It consists of text and instructions and is what is actually saved.
You can see any web page’s HTML by selecting the ‘document source’ (Netscape) / ‘source’ (Internet Explorer) option from the View menu on your browser.
It is no longer essential to know HTML, because of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors (like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, KompoZer), which generate the HTML for you. As a precaution however a limited understanding of HTML is desirable.
HTML consists of text and <tags> (the instructions) – the actual page stored doesn’t look like the displayed page.
Everything starting from the <body> and finishing with </body> will appear on your web page. In most cases tags occur in pairs – opening and closing tags – Closing tags always start with a forward slash. Notice the first tag is <html> and the last </html>. All web pages must carry these in these positions.
As a page builds up, many more tags will be added. For the most part the pairs of tags enclose ‘contents’ from which the page is built up – items like Paragraphs, Headings, Tables, Images. The tag names are usually the element names or abbreviations of them. Some examples are <table>, <img> for image, <p> for paragraph, <br> for line break and <div> for different sections of the webpage.
Nothing between the <head> and </head> tags will appear on the screen but may have quite useful functions nonetheless. For instance, between the <title> and </title> there’s the page title.
3 Steps to Setting Up Your Own Web Site
- 3.1 Purchase a Domain Name (if desired)
A “www.somewhere.com” name for your web site is called a domain name. These are sold by domain registrars and you typically pay for them by the year. The first step is to check to see if the name that you want is available. If you don’t purchase a domain name, then you just use the URL given to you by the web server.
- 3.2 Sign Up for a Web Hosting Service:
In order to run your own web site you need a web hosting service or a web server. You can choose for a payed account or a free account, which will have more limitations. Hosting services and domain names are often provided by the same company.
The important information that you will need to know is the “FTP Settings” of your account — you will have need this to publish.
- 3.3 Create Your Web Site
The next step is to actually build your web site. It’s best that you start off simple while you are learning. As your knowledge and skills increase you can start to build more sophisticated web sites.
We recommend the following guidelines when building your web site:
• Store all of your web pages and images in the same directory
• make subdirectories to make your site well-organized
• Only images in the format: .gif, .jpg, and .png are usable on the web
• Do not use spaces and capital letters in your file names (use underscore _ )
• Your web pages should have the extension .html
• Your home page should have the name index.html
- 3.4 Publish (Upload) Your Web Site
Before you (or anyone) can view your web site on the Internet you need to publish (or upload) your pages and images to your web server. You will use the settings from your web hosting service to publish your site to the web server.
- 3.5 Let People Know About Your Site
After you create your web site you will want to tell others about it. The best way to do this is to send the link to friends and colleagues. If you would like to make your site more accessible to other people on the Internet you will have to get it listed in Search Engines like Google. Here are some search engines that you can publish your new site to.
• Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/
• The Open Directory Project – http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
• MSN Search – http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
• Yahoo Search – http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
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