Beginning Web Manager Primer
Introduction
This primer is here to help you set up your first web site. The whole idea behind a primer is not to show you a specific set of steps to get a task done, but to provide you with just enough background knowledge to help you get the job done easier and faster. This primer should also be used as a "jumping-off point." The information provided here will help you make better use of web search engines and documentation to fill in any questions you have after reading this.
This primer assumes that you already use a standard computer operating system (ie. MS Windows or MacOS) for everyday work. We will also have to assume that you are familiar with your web browser (MS Internet Explorer, Mac Safari, Mozilla Firefox, etc). If you feel confused with the web, in general, this guide may start off a little rough since you should already be comfortable with the idea of browsing web sites in general.
The World Wide Web
What is the World Wide Web?
If you don't already know, the World Wide Web (WWW) is a really generic term that refers to all the web sites that are publicly accessible on the Internet. That sounds reasonable to most of us, but what people don't usually understand is that there are a lot of things that the WWW is not. For instance, web sites have nothing to do with email. Some web sites may provide certain interfaces to using email, but the method we use to move email around has nothing to do with web sites. Another area of confusion is using the term "Internet" interchangeably with "web" or "WWW."
It's important to think of the Internet as just a means of access to the web. It's like using streets to access certain locations in a city. A building is not dependent on the streets except that they are usually the easiest way to arrive at that building.
This brings us to our next topic: How do you know how to drive to a specific building if you've never been there before? The answer is to look up the address of that building and find out the necessary information for us to create a path from our current location to that address. Well, that's a fairly simple task for us to perform, but computers have a slightly more complicated approach when dealing with web sites on the Internet. The next section will show you how we navigate to a particular "address" on the "information super highway."
Your Corner of the Web
If you want to set up shop on the Internet for any number of reasons, one thing that will be indispensable is a domain name. Simply put, a domain name is your way of providing people with an easy-to-use address to your virtual building on the Internet. Just like the name implies, a domain name establishes the boundaries of your presence on the Internet. It will tell people how to contact you via email, it will help them find your web site with little effort, and it can provide you with a lot of other capabilities that are well beyond the scope of this guide.
In our context, we'll be most concerned with how a domain name can provide a path to our information on our web site. This is accomplished by using a lot of fairly sophisticated software. The idea is that your site has two (or more) methods of addressing. One is very unfriendly to people: It involves using a 4 byte integer number that is usually expressed as four single-byte decimal groups. If that sounds complicated, good--it is. That's why people came up with the idea of domain names. This allows us to reference any of these numbers (called "IP addresses") using a, hopefully, simple name.
The details behind this process are unimportant to you at this stage. Suffice to say that every host computer (server) on the Internet can be accessed by using their unique IP address. By registering a domain name, we now have a method to determine the location of a specific server on the Internet without memorizing large sets of numbers.
The next section covers the process of registering a domain name for your own use.
Your First Web Site
Obtaining a Domain Name
The actual process of securing your domain name will be different depending on your web hosting provider, but it's usually similar in every case. I would recommend you apply for a domain name through your web hosting provider. This usually saves you some money and can keep you from making some mistakes this early in your web experience. The other ways to obtain a domain name is to go through a 3rd-party registrar or straight to the source and register a domain name with Network Solutions (VeriSign). I would recommend you avoid 3rd party registrars that claim amazing savings over Network Solutions. There's usually a reason they're so cheap. Besides, the most you'll ever pay for a domain name is $35.00 per year. If that sounds like a large investment, you might want to consider not buying name brand breakfast cereal for a couple months out of the year.
Choosing a domain name is certainly daunting, so I'll give you a couple tips to making it an effective domain:
- Make it human pronounceable.
A domain like "rcp20.com" requires the same amount of memorization that an IP address would. - Make it short.
Although, it will be hard to find an extremely short name that works well with your purposes (most of the good ones are taken), you should strive to keep it under twelve characters. Otherwise, you risk the same amount of confusion a simpler name would avoid. - Make it consistent.
A common mistake is for people make elements of their domain inconsistent with each other. A classic mistake is to mix acronyms or abbreviations with complete words. Don't ever sign up for something like "hbcautomotive.com" lest you want your customers to try to remember what part of your company's name is not abbreviated. - Avoid "funny" characters.
If you want a domain name you can verbally express to someone in conversation, you can't use things like underscores (_) or other symbols in your domain name. Also, you won't be able to use a dot (.) in your base domain name (but, you can use it with "subdomains"). The only "funny" character that I would say is acceptable is the hyphen (-) since most people are cool with the idea of a "dash" like "johnson-smith-limited.com."
After you've chosen a domain name, go to a registrar's web site (like Network Solutions and find out if it's available. If so, you're on your way to carving out your corner of the World Wide Web. If you're already past this point, let's move to the next part of our guide: creating a web site.
How do I create a web site?
In a nutshell, there are three ways for a beginner to create a web site:
- Learn a lot of strange markup syntaxes and programming languages. Then, write every single character that's required to make a web site function using a keyboard and a plain text editor.
- Learn how to use a visually-oriented web page editor. You'll probably find one of these on most computers these days without installing additional software. If you're using the full Mozilla web browser, you have a fairly nice visual editor you've probably never seen. Otherwise, obtaining something like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage is usually very simple.
- Pay someone else to do it. This option isn't nearly as fun as the other two, but it gets the job done.
If you decide the path of the masochist (learning to write everything by hand), all I can say is "good luck." To start down this road, the best resource available is all the tutorials on W3C. Focus on CSS, HTML/XHTML, and JavaScript to get started. Later, you can look into advanced topics such as PHP, Perl, and MySQL.
If you aren't all that excited about reading a hundred pages just to create a few simple web pages, it will be worth your time to learn to use a visual editor such as the ones listed above. Any of these editors will look and act like any word processing program you've used in the past. If you need some text to be bold, just highlight the text and click the button on the toolbar that is usually labeled with a "B."
How do I publish a web site?
Keep in mind that no matter how you choose to create your web site, the method your web site is stored on your disk will be indistinguishably identical. If you use a regular word processor, you already know that a document is stored in a file on your disk. To open that file, you need to locate the file in its folder (that you chose when you saved it), and use the appropriate program to open the file (usually, this is as simple as double-clicking on the file).
A web page is no different. Each document is usually represented by a file with a ".html" extension. If you've used any graphics in your document, you will also have a few image files (usually ".gif" or ".jpg" files) in a folder somewhere near your ".html" file. The collection of files that are created when creating a web site are used to publish your site on the Internet.
The easiest way to allow everyone else to see your web site is to place these files on a computer that has a dedicated connection to the Internet and is running a special program called a "web server." This program will allow anyone on the Internet to connect to that computer and download the documents and files you have created. Once downloaded, most people will see the same thing you saw when you created your web site.
To accomplish this, there are several methods to publish a web site:
- Your web hosting provider may have provided "FTP" connection information. This information allows you to use an FTP (File Transport Protocol) program to move files from your computer's disk to the disk of the web hosting provider's web server. You will need to read the documentation that came with your FTP software or find out from your hosting provider how to use FTP.
- Your web hosting provider may have installed special software on their server to make uploading files a simple process of using your web browser to fill out a couple forms specifying what files to transfer. If this is the case, their software should have documentation available on their site.
- If your provider supports HTTP uploads or other proprietary publishing methods (such as FrontPage Extensions), there's a good chance that a visual web page editor has the capability to use those methods to send the files to the web server. Since this is less secure than the other methods, most providers won't give you this kind of access without you first asking for it.
Once your files are on the web server, you should be able to put your domain name into the address bar of your web browser and view your web site. The following section will provide a few details on things that you will need to observe in order to create a functioning and easily-accessed web site.
A Few Gory Details
Files, Directories, and Paths
First, how do you store and locate files on your computer? For most of us, we like to use those little file folders to group our files into some kind of organizational structure. Storing a web site is no different. Each file will be located in some kind of directory. Unfortunately, it's not always obvious how your programs are able to recognize different files even if they have the same name, but are located in different folders. If you plan to use graphics or link to other documents on your web site, you will need to understand the basics of how software locates files on your computer.
When you create a new file and store it in a folder, the only way we can find that file again is to find that folder. But, how do we find that folder? Well, we find the folder in which that folder lives. And how do we find that folder? Well, we're obviously seeing a pattern. To locate a file we need to know something about each of the folders along the way to finding that file. This is called a "path." If you pretend that your computer's disk is a dense forest and that you can never see anything except for the list of folders right in front of you, you will quickly see why we call it a path. The only way to locate the correct file is to choose the correct turn in our path every time we're presented an option. So, if you have a folder with three folders inside, you will have three choices to change direction when you arrive at that base folder. We call the folder's behind us "parent folders" or "parent directories" and we call the folders in front of us "subfolders," "subdirectories," or "child folders."
So where do we start? Well, every system likes to treat this starting point a little differently, but most of the time we will be starting at the "root" of your hard disk drive. On Windows, this usually means the "C:" drive in your "My Computer" window. On other systems it might just be expressed as the "/" directory. To find a file, we specify a path from this point of origin: "C:\Temp\Example.html" or "/tmp/example.html." Each word in between the slashes (reverse slashes for Windows) indicates the name of a folder (or change in path). This gives us the ability to express a very complex path in a simple string of characters. When we're dealing with web sites, however, our point of origin is slightly different. It's important to know that we can either assume that the folder in which the current document exists is our point of origin (a relative path), or we can assume that the folder at the "root" of our web site (the first place people arrive if they use your domain name) is our point of origin (an absolute path).
To demonstrate this, assume that you create two documents to use for
your web site. One is called "index.html" (this is usually the first page
people will see when they first arrive at your web site), and the other is
called "example.html." Both of these files exist in the same folder. If you
wanted people to move from your home page (index.html) to the second page,
you will need to specify the path between the pages in a hyperlink.
(Creating hyperlinks is specific to the type of software you are using to
create your web pages, so I will just present the path information.) Your
path would be: example.html. You'll notice there are no slashes
or folder names. That's because the documents exist in the same folder. If
we were to move the "example.html" file into a folder called "folder1" that
is in the same folder as "index.html," our path would look like this:
folder1/example.html. This tells our visitor's web
browser that it will need to specify more information to locate our
document.
Once you get to the point of using relative paths, you might try to
start using absolute paths. The difference here is that we don't care
where our current document lives. We can move the current document to a new
folder and the hyperlink still works (as long as we don't move the document
to which the link points). To specify an absolute path, you start
with the forward slash: /folder1/example.html. This means that
we're saying that our point of origin is the web server's "root" folder.
For your web site, this will be the same folder in which you put your home
page.
Clearly, there are cases when we would like to use one type of path over another. Basically, all you have to think about is how likely the target is to move in the future. If the target of your link is always in the same place (like an image file or the home page), we should probably stick to using absolute paths. If the target is likely to move (especially if it moves at the same time our source document moves), a relative path will save the day.
Finally, there is a way to specify a specific document on your web site
from anywhere else on the Internet. This is called a URL (Universal
Resource Locator). The URL is composed of the protocol being used (we always
use HTTP unless we're developing a specialized application), the web site's
domain name, and the document's path from the root of your web site:
http://example.com/folder1/example.html
If you want other web sites to link into anything besides your home page,
you will want to provide this kind of path to your document. Conversely,
if you are providing your visitors with links to other web sites, you will
need to specify the same amount of information. Of course, linking to a
specific document is optional. In that case, a domain name without
any path information will take you to their home page:
http://example.com
Web Site Navigation and Organization
It should be clear at this point that we can arrange documents into some kind of structure. If you have a very simple web site (less than a dozen documents), it is common practice to place all the ".html" files in the root of the web site, and to place all auxiliary files (graphics, images, downloadable PDFs, etc) into subdirectories from the root. A common layout might look like this:
/index.html /page1.html /page2.html /img/title_graphic.gif /img/foot_graphic.gif /img/bullet.gif /res/product_list.pdf
This keeps our common resources in easy-to-find places and our web site's information accessible with a minimum of path specification. At this point, linking between documents simply requires you to specify their file name in the link, and loading an image requires a simple, single-directory name.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this has provided you with enough general knowledge to be able to find the answers to your specific questions based on your environment. If you find that something about your software is confusing, the first place I would look is the "Help" menu provided by any program that is worth the effort to install. After that, the greatest resource available is to search for your answers on Google. If you still can't find the answer to your problem, you can try several other options:
- See if your web hosting provider has any online documentation on their web site. All the good ones do.
- Try to contact your hosting provider's technical support. If you think your question is a rare one, it may not be easy to find except for asking an expert.
- If you're using a visual editor, and the "Help" menu is not answering your questions, you may need to contact the manufacturer or search their web site for the answers to your questions.
Glossary
In addition to this list of words, you should also be aware of a site that can help you find out what all those acronyms represent: Acronym Finder.
- Domain Name
A name used to specify a location on the Internet. Domain names are used to translate human-readable names into computer-readable numbers. - Hyperlink
A link used to reference another part of a Hypertext document or another document or resource (such as images or other multimedia). Hyperlinks are usually traversed by simply clicking on the appropriate area within the Hypertext document. - Hypertext
The type of document that allows an array of display configurations that was created for use on the WWW. The abbreviation "HTML" stands for "HyperText Markup Language." This is the text-based code that is used to represent the document's internal structure. The more current form of HTML is called "XHTML" because it follows a more simple pattern of document structure that is a subset of XML (eXtensible Markup Language). - Internet
Internet is short for "interconnected network." When used in the proper form (capital "I"), this refers to all of the networks around the world that are connected to each other using a specific protocol called "Internet Protocol" (IP). - IP Address
The number each computer connected to the Internet uses to identify itself from each other. Besides private networks (which most people on broadband with multiple computers use), each computer on the Internet has an IP address that is completely unique. IP addresses are made up of a 4 byte number that is usually represented as follows: 128.80.40.192. - Protocol
Protocol is a generic term that refers to the standards used between parties to communicate with each other. Since all kinds of software all over the world need to be able to exchange information, a set of rules need to be established that each end will have to follow to get anything useful done. Common protocols you will encounter: IP (Internet Protocol), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transport Protocol), TCP (Transport Control Protocol), UDP (User Datagram Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol). - Web Page
A single document within a web site. A single ".html" file makes up a web page. - Web Site
A collection of documents and resources that are used to display any range of information to a visitor. - Web Server
This can either refer to a computer connected to the Internet that runs a specific program to allow visitors to view your web site. Or, it can refer to the program that provides this service. People will usually use this term interchangeably.