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Lesson 1
My First WebPage


Welcome to Lesson 1, in this lesson we will be discussing how WebPages work, what HTML is, and how to save and open your HTML files. This lesson is for those who are complete beginners to Web Page building. If your not a complete beginner, you'll probably find this lesson boring, so you may want to go back and choose the lesson that best fits your needs. Each lesson goes up one level and gets more and more complex. If you are a Beginner, you've found the right page.



So, you want to make a web page. Well your in the right place.

Congratulation's, you've already taken a step into Web Design by visiting this page. Creating Websites is not only a great hobby, and very profitable, but it can also be very fun. So wither the reason for deciding to build a website be for fun, for a company, or even to make some money, it was a great idea.

If you haven’t noticed by now, websites are popping up everywhere, seems like everyone has a website, and websites are constantly updated, to make them bigger and better than ever. So the future for web designers is looking very profitable.


A website is something you can constantly make bigger and better, there’s no limits to what you can do. It's like the ultimate video game, you can never be totally finish because there's always more you can build to it.



Before building a website, lets make sure you have everything

  1. A browser, if your looking at this page, you have one. Yea you, you have one, if you didn't have one you would not be viewing this page. Most likely the name of your browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer , Netscape Navigator , or Opera . You can find out the name of your browser by looking at the very top of this screen, it should say the title of this web page, then the name of your browser. If you have a computer that you bought with windows already installed in it, you most likely have Internet Explorer. It's a good idea to have the most recent version of the browser your using. Version’s of browser's get released every few months. You can download the latest version of your browser absolutely FREE by going to the browser's web page. Now you don't have to do this now, but in the near future your probably going to want to do this.

  2. Next your going to need something to write your web page in. If you have Windows you can use Windows Notepad or WordPad by going to (Start-->Programs-->Accessories--> and then down to Notepad). If your using a Mac, you can use Simple Text. You can use any word processor to write your web page in but if your just starting out I would suggest using Notepad, WordPad, or Simple Text. Why do I suggest this, because when your done writing your web page, when you go to save it, it automatically puts in in the correct format. If you use another word processor it might not automatically do this.

  3. There's a few other thing's you will need such ass web space to place your website, but well get into that further in later lesson's. As of right now, if you have the 2 items listed above, you can start building your website.



How it all work's

A web page is set up in codes. These codes tell the browser, (Witch is the thing you look through to see a web page) what to do. When you view a web page, for example this one, you see graphics, words, different colors, link's to other pages, etc... But what you don't see is the code's that put all of the page together. All the graphics links colors and everything else on the web page is written in plan text. Text is what your browser reads. Text is all the letters and numbers and symbols that are on your keyboard, both lower and capitol case.

To create a web page you have to use different codes. These codes tell the browser what to do. You use codes to display everything on your web page.



So how do you view the web page?

When you type in a internet address for example "www.yahoo.com", your browser goes to the address and grabs the codes from the server of that internet address. Your browser then reads the codes and displays the web page for you to see.
HTML
There’s many different types of coding out there, but the one your going to start out learning is HTML. If your wondering HTML stands for:

H-yper
T-ext
M-ark Up
L-anguage

This type of coding makes up most of the page. For now it's going to make up the entire page. Later you can learn other types of coding such as Java or JavaScript, witch are more complex then HTML.

HTML is actually very simple to learn. The only hard part is starting off. It's a little ruff at first, but you get used to it quickly. The reason is because everything is written basically in the same manner. All coding is written in BRAKETS, the brackets are the < less than sign and the > grater than sign. You place the code within these brackets and the browser reads it and configures it to display the web page. You will learn more about coding in the next lesson.



Writing The HTML

Your going to be writing your HTML in your word processor. As said above, it is suggested that you use Windows Notepad, WordPad, or Mac's Simple Text to start off with.

Now if you've written HTML before, or talked to someone who has written HTML before, they might say you should use a HTML program to help you write your page. I would suggest not doing this. One reason is they do 90% of the work for you, they place the codes and you learn basically nothing. You might be saying well I wont need to learn anything if the program will do everything for me, well your wrong, because no program can do as much as you could if you learned web design on your own. If you use a program you can only create a web page as good as the program can create a web page. If you create a web page without a program doing the work for you, there is no limit to how good the page can be.



Saving Your HTML

  1. Once your done writing you HTML your going to be saving it in a certain way. After your done your going to go to file, and then down to Save As (As seen in Figure 1-1 and 1-2). This is very important to do. Do not choose "Save", always choose "Save As".

    Figure 1-1                                   Figure 1-2
                              

  2. In the Save As Dialog Box that pop's up, depending on what word processor your using, you should see a place where you can type a file name, and a place where you can choose what file type to save it as.

  3. For the File Name, you can choose anything, and then put the extension .html at the end.

  4. As for file type, if your using Notepad, WordPad, or Simple Text, the correct file type will automatically be there, if not your going to need to choose a plain text file type. The file type should be Text, or Text Documents, or ASCII TEXT DOS etc... It has to be a plain text file type.

  5. Next choose where you would like to save your file in, and choose "Save".

Here's an example, say I want to name my file John, so under "File Name" I would put John.html, and under File Type, I would choose Text (As seen in Figure 1-3).

Figure 1-3



Opening Your File

Now there’s 2 ways to open up the file you just saved. One way is you could go directly to the file on your computer, and double click on it to open the browser. Or you could open your browser, and in your browser choose file, under file choose open. In the open dialog box choose the file you saved and click open.


Now you can play around with this, and try saving and opening files, remember how to do this because in the next lesson you will be learning how to write HTML codes, and you will need to know how to save and view your web page in a browser.

So go, go test out what you know and get a good night sleep to let it all sink in, come back tomorrow and will get started on the coding.



On To Lesson 2







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