We are starting a new series of articles intended to describe the process of website creation. Here we will share a to z information about creating a website, registering a domain, purchasing hosting, publishing files, customizing your website with various tools, information and guide about Content Management Systems (CMSs) and many other kinds of useful tips that can be helpful when you are creating a website.
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Figure 1 Create a website
When we search on Google for how to create a website, there are many links and advertisements. Many companies offer various prices and offer to attract customers that lead the users to pay large amounts of money and waste their time also.
The following are some basic topics to be covered in this article series.
Website Creation
Creating a website is the first part of your process of getting online. However, there are many tools and software available to create a website, we expect you to have an average level knowledge of HTML, CSS and other web scripting languages to create a webpage. A website is a collection of webpages linked together to form a useful collection of information.
Domain Registration
A domain is a simpler name of an IP address. In computing it can be defined as “The part of a network address that identifies it as belonging to a specific domain.” As we have read, each computer in the world has a nearly unique IP (Internet Protocol) address. To access a specific computer, we need to remember its IP address but that is difficult and not easy. To overcome that, there is an authority called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that is also known as ICANN and governs the domain registration process and makes it unique so the conflict of domains can be eliminated.
Website Hosting
Now, once you created a website and gotten a domain name, the last step of your online presence is website hosting. In computing, Hosting is the term for serving webpages from a computer that is connected to the internet. You must purchase a space on any of the online servers that can server webpages you created. There are several kinds of hosting packages based on the needs of the user and infrastructure, location and so on.
As you know and we said in the earlier article, web pages are the collection of HTML tags with CSS and images and other components that can be audio-visual like audio files or animations or video clips. There are many other editors and software packages that can assist you in creating a website. The most famous of them are Adobe System's Dreamweaver, Microsoft's Visual Studio, Google's Web Developer and many HTML editors available over the internet that are used when creating a website. We will explain them here.
All of the tools we described and available in the market do a simple job, they create the HTML code of what you did, like just adding radio buttons, check-boxes or any other HTML controls. We did not get chance to complete our HTML tutorial series, but still we have some introductory articles in the HTML category.
A website is about creating a page and linking them together. A basic website might be a single web page containing all the information or might contain multiple pages. Even further classified, websites are divided into two types, depending on the nature of their content.
Static: These are the pages served to the visitor as they were created and having the same content. Alternatively such pages are also called stationary or flat page. You see about us content or some other HTML file that does not change depending on the user's location or user requirements. They are called a static webpage.
Dynamic: These are files that are generated by web applications. These pages contain data depending on the user's request and based on a template or just data only. You check the result of your university or book a ticket and take a print out with your own details. That page is not stored in server as it is displayed, the page is generated dynamically as a reponse to your request, so such pages are called dynamic webpages.
A basic website is supposed to contain some webpages with images and a basic design that is preferred similar to all pages in the website. You can create a design with basic needs with cool CSS and images like header and footer, you can search for html templates in Google also. After creating a perfect design you can make a copy of them and change the content and rename them with the desired name, like about.html, contact.html and so on.
Now the final step is to create navigation among these files using a menu. Using the anchor tag of HTML, you can create navigation. Let's have a look at the following HTML code without any CSS that will link files with each other.
One thing I forget to mention is that, in HTML, generally index.html is considered to be the start-page of the website. If you have multiple webpages in a website filter, the index.html file will be served if the path is not defined. If there is no index.html file available, an error file will be shown. So have a look at the following code.
- <a href="index.html">Home</a> | <a href="about.html">About</a> | <a href="contact.html">Contact</a>
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Figure 2 Welcome to website
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Figure 3 New Folder
Here we have created a few files with the design described previously and created a drop-down menu. In the next article, we will try to cover the next step of our series. In this article, we learned how to create a website by linking multiple web pages together. If you have any doubt in this article then you can share your views.