Website Creation for the Novice
Website Creation for the Novice |
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Richard H. Wiggins, III, MD has reported no financial interest, arrangement or affiliation with a commercial organization that may have a direct or indirect influence in the subject matter of this presentation.
Objectives
The ability to create and maintain a Web site on the Internet has become significantly easier over the last decade to the point where the Internet itself has become the great equalizer. A 12-year old kid in his garage can easily make a Web site that looks just as professional as Ford Motor Company. This is a guide for beginners to Web site creation, for more detailed information, you can look for the Advanced Web site creation guide in the Syllabus. The entire process of creating and posting a Web page is easier than it looks. This guide will go over some of the basics, and review some tools for help. The easiest way to make a Web site is to pay someone else to do it, like many things in life, but you can do it yourself, without that much in terms of finances, or even time. Some of the first things to think about include just what it is you want to put on the site, and what your site will be about. You might want to start off by making a list of exactly what you want to put on your site, such as information about your Radiology department, faculty pictures, a simple digital teaching file, etc.
Nomenclature, abbreviations, acronyms and other stuff
One of the first things to do when thinking about making a Web site is to get an understanding of what some of those crazy words are. Here is a quick glossary:
URL: Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web (WWW). This is similar to the street address of your house, but it is the address of a specific page on the Internet.
HTML: HyperText Markup Language, the authoring language used to create documents on the WWW.
Hyperlink: An element in an electronic document that links to another place in the same document or to an entirely different document. Typically, you click on the hyperlink to follow the link. Hyperlinks are the most essential ingredient of the WWW.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol, the protocol used on the Internet for exchanging files.
Browser: this is short for Web browser, or a software program that are used to find and display Web pages, i.e., Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The process of designing, creating, getting space for, and posting a Web site is much easier when using a template design software package. You will most likely use some software to help you make the pages, make some basic HTML codes, link pictures and pages to other pictures and pages, and move the files for the site from your computer to another computer that is hosting your site. A Web page itself is simply a text document that is stored on a computer (Web hosting computer), that is then delivered to users by a Web server for use in a Web browser. The text documents themselves are digital documents with HTML code, or "tags", that tell the Web browsers how to display the data included within them, things like the text itself, font size, color, alignment, etc. The big Web hosting computers are actually similar to your computer in structure, with a bunch of folders and files that are organized in some way that store all the data for the Web pages, but containing the data for your site, as well as data for other sites on the Internet. The Web server is a computer software program that accepts requests from Web browsers to see Web pages, and delivers the data through a Web host, through the internet, and to the user's computer. Therefore, the Web browsers talk to the Web server to find and retrieve the documents on the Web hosting computer through the Internet, and display the pages on a computer.
Although you can create the Web pages, and just store them on your own computer, often there are Web hosting companies for free or very cheap that will help you with templates and space for your pages. Often this space is provided for free (usually a small amount of space) when you purchase a Web page builder software package. Sometimes the "Free" in the sale price is made up for by the company putting banner ads and pop-up ads all over your site, so be prepared for that. These can easily be added to your site by the Web Host system. If you are interested in this option, some common hosters include:
TopCities: http://www.topcities.com/
Host Depatment: http://free.hostdepartment.com/
FreeWeb Page: http://www.freewebpage.org/
Usually these sites will require some registration, for the space, with you giving them their email (which I am sure they will keep to themselves!), and saying that you understand their policies about using banner and pop-up ads on the sites. Usually the software they offer is good for creating basic Web pages and sites.
There are many free Web page builders available that you might want to try one of these:
EvrSoft: http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage2.shtml
Or:
WebDwarf: http://www.virtualmechanics.com/products/dwarf/
You can actually see the secret HTML code of any Web page with your browser. Say you were looking at a web site:
By simply clicking on "View" in the file menu bar, and then clicking on "Source":
and then you can save this page to your computer, and edit it in Notepad. So, technically you could just take code from other sites and put it in yours!
You can add interactivity to your site with those software packages relatively easily, with things like guest books, polls, counters, menus, animations, etc. There are some Web sites that make these tools available like these:
Homepage Tools: http://www.homepagetools.com/
WebPage Tools: http://www.webpage-tools.com/
Netscape Navigator actually comes with a simple tool called Composer, to help you with web pages, you can download it here:
Netscape: http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp
and there are other sites that can help you create as well as edit pages, by making HTML code available for you to copy and paste into your pages like this one:
WebSpawner: http://www.webspawner.com/
HTML is the code for the data that generates Web pages. You can create these files easily yourself without the software above with a basic text editor on your computer. On a Mac you can use TeachText, and on a Windows box, you can use Notepad. After you open the program, you can highlight and then copy this text and paste it into the program window:
<html> <head> <title>My first web page</title> </head> <body> This is text that will be in my first Web page! </body> </html>
Now save the new file as "mypage1.html" on your computer in a location you will be able to find later, and open you Web browser on your computer, and click on "File", then "Open", and browse your computer to find the file you saved and open it to see the page. It's that simple! The code above includes some basic tags that are used in Web pages, that are frequently paired, so that the second, or ending tag uses a forward slash "/" to tell the browser that it has reached the end of that pair of tags.
So, in this example, the first tag "<html>" tells the Web browser that it is looking at an HTML coded file. The next tag "<head>" tells the browser that the next text should be displayed at the top of the browser window in the computer. The next paired tag set "<body>" tells the Web browser that that code is to be displayed on the page itself. These tags can be considered as "open" and "close", and usually paired, so that the browser starts something, and can see where to stop. Similar tags exist for things like making text bold:
<b>This text will be bold because of the paired tags around it</b>, but this text will not be bold, because it is outside the paired tags
There are many other paired tags that will be discussed in the ELC workshops, and you can get more information at many sites online.
After you have created your Web pages, you will need to move them to the Web Host computer. If you have gotten one of the packages above, they likely have sent you instructions to FTP files to their Web host computer system. There are also programs to help you here. Most of the connections are automated, so you don't have to know all that much do to this either. Some of the most popular (free) options are:
WS_FTP LE: http://www.ftpplanet.com/downloadLE.asp
CuteFTP: http://www.cuteftp.com/downloads/cuteftp.asp
I have used WS-FTP LE for a couple of years to maintain several web sites, and have found it easy to use and adequate for my sites.
For more information on Web page creation, please attend one of the ASNR ELC workshops, or check out the links in this article.
Copyright © 2004 American Society of Neuroradiology, www.asnr.org