Simple Steps to Creating Your Own Website

The widespread availability of the needed software has made the creation of Websites - for both personal and commercial purposes - feasible for anyone willing to devote a little time to learning the appropriate format. All that is needed is a simple writing program, such as Text Editor, FTP (file transfer protocol) software to upload files to a Web server, a domain name, and some knowledge of HTML commands.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is simply a type of formatting that translates codes, text, graphics, and other programs (such as music and video) into colorful Web pages. All the elements of a site are created with Text Editor and HTML commands. It can be helpful, when you're starting out, to either outline or draw your basic concepts for the layout of a page and its content before beginning to program it. You might use Windows Notepad to create two folders: one for a "rough" or working draft of a page, and another to store the final HTML and graphics files.

HTML tags are always separated from regular letters and words by angle brackets: . A backslash within the brackets - - tells the browser that it is an ending tag. Note: for all the following examples (except where noted), substitute brackets for quotation marks when you write the actual code. For example, "p" tells the browser to begin a new paragraph and "/p" denotes the end of that paragraph. Other simple HTML commands include "b" for boldface, "i" for italics, and "h" for heading. All HTML pages will begin with an "html" tag at the top of the page and an "/html" tag at its end. You can also start out a page with a header - "head" to "/head" - wherein you can write comments or notes to yourself for later use that won't be visible on the actual Web page.

From there, begin with a "body" command and insert all the text, tags and links that you want on that page. Hyperlinks, which are links to other sites on the Web, are created with this command: "a href= "http:// address of site/""name of site"/a". (Quotation marks enclosing the address are valid; replace the others with brackets). Such a command with make the name of the Website appear at the place on the page where the link is located, but keep the actual address invisible. When you become more adept at programming, you can also use Images and Other Files to tell the HTML document to load files storing photos, graphics illustrations, and video clips. Again, remember to end your Web page with the "/html" command (this can be easy to forget).

Assuming that you already have an Internet Service Provider, you will now need the FTP software to upload your file to the Web server. In order to make your pages available to other searchers on the Internet, you will need to get a domain name. A domain name provides a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for your Website, and can be obtained from a variety of places - such as Yahoo! - for a relatively low monthly charge. Once you've established your domain name, your site will be visible to Search Engines, and you can notify your friends, family, and other contacts about where they can go to check out the information and/ or products that you've made available on the Web.