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| As you may have already noticed, there is a language in this cyberworld
unlike any you may have heard before. Actually, to be honest
there are several languages, each one written by someone else for what
they thought was a better idea of how to make things work here. How
very convenient for the poor folks who find themselves scurrying about,
trying to learn whatever they have to learn to keep up with this fast paced
internet society. Whether you end up owning a "Homepage" or an entire
"Website", there are certain things you need to know to save you from the
pitfalls of "Cyber Doom".
First we will explain in very general terms what this Internet business is all about. If you can imagine a very large filing cabinet in front of you. The sign above it reads, "The Interenet", or "The World Wide Web". Now this filing cabinet has about a million drawers in it, and that can be pretty overwhelming to someone upon openning the door to the room that houses this monstrosity for the first time. But, that's only because there are so many files kept here. Each Website or Hompage is a seperate file waiting for someone to open the drawer it's kept in and take a look at it. So, just take a deep breath, because the secret here is just like in any filing cabinet. "Surfing the Web". Sometimes people just flit from one drawer to another checking out what's inside this big filing cabinet. They may or may not have an idea of what they're looking for. "Researching the Web". Just like surfing the web, sometimes we find ourselves needing information that we know is available on the Internet. Now if you remember that you are looking at the Internet just as though it's a filing cabinet, you may already realize that there must be a place where all the information inside is organized and cateloged. There is such a place, in fact there are several of them, and you may have already made use of one to get here. These catelogs are called "Search Engines", and they are a very convenient way of finding whatever you want in the miliions of files that are kept here. This is accomplished by putting in "Key Words" that describe what you are looking for. When you "Log On" to the Internet, your "Internet Service Provider" most likely has a window that comes up on your monitor. This is called your "Browser Window". You will notice at the top of this window there are words as well as little picutres called "Icons". thise icons are there to help you get from one place to another inside this filing cabinet with the click of a button. One of those helpfull little buttons should read, "Search". Clicking on this will open up another window. This window most likely offers you several options for which search engine you want to use, depending on what your provider has made arrangements for. Say for instance you want to find information on the latest activities in re-developing the Rain Forest. You would click on the "search" button, and pick one of the "search engines", (most people develop their own favorites they use.) Once you choose the "search engine" you want to use, you simply type in the "key words" you want it to look for. In this case you might use the word *Rain Forest*. You might get back more than 1,000,000 listings for files that have these key words attached to them. So, you look for a place on your search engines page to refine your search, narrowing it down to exactly what you want. Even if you still get a thousand more listings than you have time to look at, you can scan over them, and when you find one you know offers the kind of information you're looking for, most search engines will give you an option to find more sites just like that one. Now, how do all these Websites and Homepages get into this huge filing system? People design them and put them there, just like someone in an office types up a letter or report to be placed in a filing cabinet. The only difference is, they use different languages to do it. Some of these languages accomplish the same task, but do it in a diffferent way. Even this is not difficult to understand if you think about it.
Sometimes though, it is necessary to use one language in one part of a Website and another language in another part of the same site to get everything on that you want. This is where it makes it difficult for the average person to design their own site. If you are busy running the Human Resources office of a large manufacturing firm, you don't have time to sit down and study four or five languages just to design a website. To keep things simplified here, we will only mention three of the more common languages used in designing a website. 1. HTML - (Hyperext Mark-up Language) This is a system of marking or tagging a document so that it can be viewed on the World Wide Web. These marke-ups or tags tell the browser window what to display, how and where to display it, and when. Many of these tags are based on common sense, such as <b> meaning BOLD, but others are not so easy to simply figure out. And, each tag that opens a picture or text has to be closed out with a corrosponding closing tag, such as </b>. This is probably the most basic of all languages used in web design, but it does have a lot of limitations. 2. JAVA SCRIPT - This is another system of marking, tagging, and writing commands that tell the browser window a variety of things to do, from making images move on the page to giving an image the appearance of really reflecting in a lake, or playing "midi" or "wav" files. This language is much more complicated than the HTML codes, but the results are sought after by more and more people. The only problem with this language right now is that even though the numbers of Internet users are growing everyday, a good portion of them use browsers that are not JAVA SCRIPT FRIENDLY. 3. PERL - This is another language that is growing in popularity, and offers many of the same varieties of capabilities that JAVA SCRIPT does as well as a few it doesn't offer. This language is not as widely known by beginning designers, but it doesn't necessarily limit them to not being able to produce a well planned, and appealing website.
DOMAIN NAMES - This is something a lot of people are paying big bucks for. A savy sales force will convince you that your company must have your own domain name to look highly professional, and although we would agree that it does lend a professional appearance to a business when their URL address is "www.MyBusiness.com" rather than "www.wannabe/thisneighborhood/thisstreet/1111/MyBusinss.index" What they don't tell you is that a website can be established anywhere on the Internet and then one fee is paid to Internic, the Organization that issues Domain Names. Getting a Domain Name issued for your business only costs $70.00 for two years, but design firms and others will gladly charge you twice that just to fill out the 5 minute form to get your business its own Domain Name. DATA TABLES -
As mentioned earlier, there are many who would and do convince the unsuspectiong
client that a data tale is something to fear, and something to pay an outrageous
price for. A table is simply a set of codes that postions information
in a particular place on a webpage. There is nothing magical or mystical
about them. A table or "data table" can be as simple as a box you
can or cannot see that contains some text, such as this one.
Neither of these data tables took longer than 10 minutes to design, including drawing the happy face. The thing to remember here is that nearly every person doing web design uses programs that make doing such a table nothing more than a matter of pushing a button and answering a few questions. LINKS - Thise can be graphics
or text that appear on a page that are somewhat like little doorways to
other pages, or to other locations on the page you are on.
By clicking on one of these links you are automatically taken to the location
it describes.
This, of course is not all you need to know to understand the workings
of a webpage, but it should give you a little better idea of how simple
a lot the coding is for designing and developing a website. It should
not be forgotten, however, that one of the keys to designing a website
that will attract the masses is knowing how to make it appealing as well
as offering everything you wnt it to offer to those who visit.
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The little
buttons at the top of this page are links to various places on this
page. But, like the data tables, this is onother little feature
that comes with any webpage design program, and all that is needed to make
a link is the text or image you want to use and the address or target of
where you want the reader to go.