Tech Talk – Building your first web page!

Many of you have noted that you perceive web design as voodoo magic or something completely outside your realm. I get the same reaction when I bring up Art or people watch me draw. Well, I’m here to demystify things for you. If you follow the simple steps outlined you’ll create your very own web page. In the following essay, I will tell you how to put it on the web. And if you decide at the end of my essay that creating your own web page is too much, then you can easily hire a company to help you with your Web Design instead. So either way, you’re all sorted.

There are many reasons that a netroots person may want to create a web page or HTML document, be it by themselves or with the help of a website design melbourne firm. Single pages can be used as billboards for various topics you are interested in. They are static, which means they will be easily indexed by most search engines and will help to build interest in long-term issues like the environment, health care etc.

You might even be in the process of designing your own website with the help of Web design Calgary companies, and therefore you could even be looking to make valuable online content so that your site can be found easily by potential customers.

Designing a website can be difficult, so if you are not sure where to begin, you might want to reach out to a web design expert for some professional guidance.

Not sure where to begin? For awesome Austin web design, check out Big Gorilla Design. Above all, when looking for a web designer, make sure to do your research so that you can find a designer who understands the vision of your business and can get you online in a timely and professional manner.

So what makes a web page a web page? Some very simple coding. Below the fold you’ll find the bare minimum coding you’ll need to make your first web page along with an example.

Building your first web page:

Step 1. Right click on your Windows Desktop and select create New – Text Document. You’ll see your new document appear on your Desktop as New Text Document.

On Macintosh you’ll need to open your Word Processing program and follow the same steps, create a new text file and:

Step 2. Open up the file and copy and paste the following coding into it:









  
This is my first web page!


The first line tells the computer that the file is an HTML document and what type of HTML document.

The next line HTML tells the computer you are beginning your programming.

The header section tells the computer how to treat the document, we’ll get into that more in the next essay.

Close the header section.

The body is where anything you want to present on your page will be placed.

Close the body section.

Close your HTML document.

Step 3. Now save your document as: myfirstpage.html

It is important that you type in the .html as that tells your browser to open the document. Don’t worry about overwriting the .txt part.

Step 4. Click on your file myfirstpage.html and your browser will open. You will see a simple page with the text: This is my first web page! It should look like this

Congratulations! You created your first web page. Now hold on to it and next time we will create a free hosting account and upload your page.

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  1. or any other antihero you choose.

    • Valtin on January 18, 2008 at 21:40

    I hope you put this all together as a series that can be acessed by people easily online. Does DD have file download capabilities?

    Hello? System administrator?

  2. h/t to Boing Boing

  3. with a website?  Are you sure you want to do that?

    • plf515 on January 19, 2008 at 03:20

    over at dailyKos, and at SwingStateProject, I am running a series on congressional races.  

    Some of the Democratic challengers have web pages that…. well… they aren’t good.  

    So, I got to thinking that some of you techie types might volunteer to help some candidates with their pages.

    • Pluto on January 19, 2008 at 04:00

    The kind of people I love most in the world are People who Empower Others.

    You’re one of them.

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