HTML Web Development

The term web development generally refers to a larger set of technologies than just HTML. Web development is used to describe HTML when used in conjuction with other languages such as CSS, Javascript, PHP, ASP, etc...

When setting out to learn HTML Web development, you should first decide what exactly you need. There are a few options available to you depending upon your needs.

  • If you only want a simple site for yourself, you should consider getting a blog. If you require your own domain name, you will have to install the blog software onto a server (which will require you to purchase a hosting plan, cheap ones can be foung at 1and1). If however you do not need your own domain name, most blog sites allow you to host the blog with them for free. These blogging programs allow you to get set up with no HTML web development knowledge, allow you to choose from thousands of pre-made templates, and are easy to use. While great, these blogs are not reccomended for businesses. Here are some popular blogging platforms: Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Xanga.
  • If you need a web site for a business, and have no knowledge you should seriously consider hiring a HTML web developer to create you site. Even if your site is extremely simple, when created by an experienced web developer, it has a much better chance of being successful. Click here to contact us about your project.
  • The last option is to go about creating the web site yourself. To do this, you will have to learn HTML, and likely some CSS to start. The rest of this article is designed to give you some pointers as to how best to accomplish this.

If you want to start learning HTML, the good news is that you already have everything you need on your computer to start creating, and modifying HTML. You do need a place to host your site online, and a domain name, both of which can be found here.

The best idea is to start with a free HTML template, save a template you like to your computer, and open up the index.html file in notepad (or Dreamweaver if you have it). Now open up the same index.html file in your web browser, and begin comparing the two side by side. For beginners, you should only modify the page content, and not try to modify the HTML code. So find where the page title is, and change it to your own. Find the page headings, and page content, and do the exact same thing.

When done, you should have all of your content into the template, and be basically finished. The next thing to do, if necessary, is to create the rest of the pages. To do this, first locate the links in the template. These are start with <a (...) > and end with </a>. The text in between these two HTML tags is the text that will be displayed on the page, so change this to what you want to appear on the link. After creating all the text for the links, you need to change where these links point to. Look in the <a (...) tag for 'href="......"', now change the value between the quotes to the HTML page you want to link to (with a ".html" at the end of the name. So if the link name is "Products", you should save it as products.html. Once you are finished, the last thing to do is to create the other HTML pages. With the index.html file still open, click file-->save as, and save this document with the names of each of the pages your just linked to (make sure this is in the same folder as the index.html). Do this for all of the links you have, and finally create content on each the same way you did for the index.html page.

Now you have a complete web site.

The final step is to actually upload your new HTML web site to the web. For this you need an FTP client, some of the more popular ones include: FileZilla, WS_FTP, Go FTP, CuteFTP, and if you have Firefox I reccomend FireFTP.

You'll need to get your FTP hostname, FTP user name and password from your hosting company. Now log into your FTP client, enter this information, and connect to the server. If successful you should see files on your computer on the left side of your screen, and files on the server on the right side. First make sure you are in the correct directory on the server (right side), this will be either 'public_html', 'www', 'html', or your domain name. Find the folder where you saved all the files you created, and select all the files for your site. Last, click the button to transfer the files to the server (usually an arrow pointing from left to right). If this is successful, your web site should now be live.

So regardless of how big or small your project is, send us a message and we'll see how we may be able to help you bring it to reality.