Web Sites: Beginner's Guide to Web Sites

Location: Articles > Web Sites > Here
Written By: Site Admin
Date: 31 Mar 2005
Level: 1 (Beginner)

A simple and straight forward beginner's guide to starting a web site, easily, and for free. Covering how web sites work and where they are stored, HTML and how it gets transferred to you, getting your site onto the net and where to go after that.

Table of Contents

  1. How Web Sites work
  2. HTML
  3. Why learn HTML?
  4. Onto the net
  5. What Now?

Part 1: How Web Sites work

We will start off with some simple facts about how web sites and the Internet works.

How data is transferred between a server and a client (web surfer)
Figure 1.1 - HTTP transfer between a server and a client (web surfer)

Don't worry if you don't understand the diagram because its explained here. Web sites are merely text files with the difference being that web sites have a .htm or .html extension (such as hello.html) and contain HTML (code that represents the content into what we see). These files are stored on web servers - a computer set up for processing requests for HTML and other web pages. Web clients or web surfers access these files by entering a domain name in the address bar eg. http://nexusfx.net. A domain name is simply a name, which refers to an IP eg. 144.25.**.***. Each server has their own IP. So when we type in that domain name, the browser connects to the server through its IP and is able to access the web pages and other content such as graphics and sound files. The web page gets transferred to us through HTTP. Then the web browser you are using such as Internet Explorer or Firefox reads the HTML and converts it into the format we see as web pages with clickable links and graphics.

Part 2: HTML

HTML is text with "tags" that affect the way in which the text and other aspects of web pages are represented.

<html>
<head>
<title>Example Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<b>This is bold text</b>
</body>
</html>
Code Snippet 2.1 - An example HTML page

Why not make this our first web page. Go into Notepad or another text editor, copy that code and save it as mypage.html and open the page in a web browser such as Internet Explorer. It should have on the page, the text, "This is bold text" in bold and have a title "Example Web Page - Microsoft Internet Explorer" or similar.

The basic parts of an HTML page.

  • <html> - Signifies the start of an HTML page.
  • <head> - Start of the head section. This is where data about the page is put, more on this later.
  • <title>Example Web Page</title> - The title, what you see at the top of your browser.
  • </head> - End of the head section.
  • <body> - Start of the body section (the actual content of the page).
  • <b>This is bold text</b> - Content of the page. <b> is the code to make text bold.
  • </body> - End of the body section.
  • </html> - End of the HTML page.

So HTML is actually very easy to learn. The code has tags ( <b>,<head>,<object> etc. ) which describe the content on the page. The tags are placed at the start and the end of the content you want changed, the end tag is the same as the start tag but it has a / in front of the tag name. So, to put "Hello" in bold text, you would use <b>Hello</b>.

Part 3: Why learn HTML?

You may be asking this and congratulations if you are, that is a good question. At the moment, there are many programs that let you make pages in WYSIWYG editors and they do most of the HTML for you and you make the page as if you are making a document in a word processor like Microsoft Word.
Here are the advantages to knowing HTML:

  • Writing/coding HTML allows for much more flexibility.
  • HTML editors have limits. There are many things they don't get right.
  • HTML editors start to have this feel and there are people who can tell you your site was made in FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
  • Errors are easier to fix, editors are often not able to fix certain problems.
  • HTML allows you to create more compatible code - HTML that can be viewed on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape etc. and on different operating systems such as Windows and Macintosh.

You may still be wondering that HTML will take too long to make a page and I agree with you. Even experienced web developers use HTML editors as well as writing HTML themselves. I recommend using both, using HTML for some things such as the page structure and HTML editors for repeated tasks that are tedious and repititive in HTML.

This is just an introduction to HTML and shows the most basic things you can do.
View our HTML section to get started with HTML.

Part 4: Onto the net

Considering most people aren't willing to spend enough money to set up a server themselves and have it on at all times and keep it up, most web page developers get a hosting service from a hosting provider. The companies that do this have their own server(s) and they allow you to upload (transfer files) onto their servers and give you a subdomain or other address and that becomes your website. For example, Geocities (don't go there, very crappy hosting service) offers 20mb hosting for free which may be enough for a small site with only web pages and graphics. The catch is they put an advertisement on your site and geocities earn their revenue that way.

There are many great free hosting providers and there is a good list of these at the following sites.
http://clickherefree.com (opens in new window)
http://free-webhosts.com (opens in new window)

Both sites offer detailed information about the host. Make sure you get a host that has FTP in the upload type.

When you finish with your web site you can upload the files from your computer onto the server through FTP. To do this get an FTP client, I suggest FireZilla or CuteFTP. To set up a connection to the server in your FTP client, you use the details the host provide, the hostname, username and password. Your hostname will be something like ftp.hostingprovider.com. If you need help with getting the FTP client to connect, look at the documentation of the program by pressing F1. There is more information in the FTP sub-section.

This is often a problematic step for beginners so feel free to ask for help in our forums or visit our support center.

To register a domain name (eg. http://nexusfx.net), find a domain name registrar, domains sell for around $7 upwards for the main domain names (.com, .net and .org).

Part 5: What Now?

This is the end of the introductory guide to creating web sites.

For those interested in learning HTML, have a look at our articles, tutorials and sample code in the HTML section.

You may also like to browse the site for other languages that extend HTML such as CSS and Javascript, and then moving onto more powerful scripting languages such as PHP that incorporate the use of databases and so on.