Building your site

How to roll your own

If you plan to use a readymade template, click on the backarrow or the box at the bottom of the page, there is nothing for you here. Likewise if you want to get an ide (Integrated Development Environment) like Dreamweaver or Frontpage this won't help much. If you are willing to learn, you can build a site equal to anything out there without spending any money beyond what I laid out of the preceding page.

The browser

A web browser is a application that reads computer files. If you open your browser and type: "file://" and then paste the file path and name of any file in your computer into the address bar, depending on the file, you will see gibberish, the contents of the file or a box asking if you want to open that file with some application. The point is the address bar tells the browser what file to read.

The URL

A url is Uniform Resource Locator. This is what makes a browser different from other applications. A browser can read any file that is reachable anywhere on the internet if you say the magic word: "http://" which means Hyper Text Transport Protocol. That "http://" at the beginning of a url tells the browser to get on the internet and look for the filename that follows.

The Website

A website is a collection of files meant to be read by a browser. These files will be a mix of words, pictures and .html (aka Hypertext Markup Language).

Build a site

Make a folder on your computer. Fill the folder with html and graphics files. Name the file you want the browser to read first "index.html". Put "file://"and the location and the name of file into the address bar to test your site. When you are happy with how your site looks, upload it to your web host.

Good luck,
Dave Driscoll