Web Page Design & Intro to Web Page Development

How the Web works

The World Wide Web is simply a large network of linked files. These files (text documents, images etc.) are accessible from any other location connected to the Internet. The only way these files can be organized in any manageable way is to use a consistent system for identifying where files are located. File locations are identified by their Uniform Resource Locator (URL). These are also called "Addresses" or "Locations" in the two most common browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. For example, the URL http://coe.nevada.edu/larchambault points to a group of files in a directory called "larchambault" that have been loaded on the College of Education server.

Web browsers

For this Web thing to work, everyone needs to speak the same language-regardless of the computer platform and browser. The language of the Web is the HyperText Mark up Language (HTML). This language uses tags to mark up text in a way that communicates how it should be formatted. For example, if I would like the word immediately to appear in bold, I would precede it with the bold open tag (<b>) and follow it with the bold close tag (</b>).

HTML: <b>Immediately</b>
Result: Immediately

A Web browser is a program that translates HTML into a formatted document. The most common browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Web Site Development Program

Developing Web pages and ultimately Web sites requires building HTML documents. One approach to building these documents is to learn all the HTML tags (i.e., learn the HTML language) and type the documents in a text editor. Another approach is to use a Web development program that is similar to a word processing application. Since the tags can be quite cumbersome and difficult, most opt to use a Web development program such as Dreamweaver. The main task programs such as Dreamweaver carry out, is the translation of a formatted document to HTML (the opposite of the browser). The program creates the webpage in WYSIWYG fashion (What You See Is What You Get), instead of requiring the user to learn the HTML programming language.

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