A place to start

If you are new to the Internet or never had a web site of your own before the following information is supplied to try and assist you.

Information will be added at regular intervals. If you have any suggesting about what topic you would like information on or if you have an article you would like see published on the subject of getting your web site going please e-mail us.at info@jr-websites.co.uk

If you wish to print these pages please

---

What is the Internet

The Internet consists of a large number of computers all connected together.

The above picture shows just some of the Internet links in the world between the servers. These computers are the Internet servers on which the files for web sites are stored and served up to people asking to see the various web sites. Your computer is termed the client and the client talks to the Internet via your telephone line.

You can get a telephone number for your modem to call from numerous companies including ourselves. The costs vary from a monthly charge which gives so many hours of Internet connection with no additional telephone call charges or as with ours there is no monthly charge you just pay for a local call each time you connect. This connection will give you your access to the whole Internet and e-mail, you do not need to connect by telephone directly to the company that hosts your web site or e-mails you only need a door way into the Internet.

What is a web site?

A web site is a collection of documents, which are linked together and collectively given a name. The name given is called a domain name and must be unique. For this reason the domain names are all registered with central catalogues that only allow registration if the name is unique. One of these is Internic who has an address of http://www.internic.co.uk. These domain names have to be purchased and registered, we can do this for you. The documents that make up the site can contain virtually anything from normal text to videos.

In order for people to see your pages they must be in a format that can be understood. If you think about sending someone a letter in English and the recipient only understands Japanese they will not be able to read your letter. So we have a common language called HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and a set of conventions which have been drawn up to try and ensure that we all stay compatible.

I hear you say 'I can't program so how can I do a web site.' The answer is quite easy you can use programs such as Microsoft Word to design your web pages. In Word you just create your pages as you would if writing a letter, then in the file menu use the option to save as HTML. This will convert your pages into web pages. There are other products you can buy such as Microsoft Frontpage which are design to let you build web sites without any programming knowledge. If you are looking around for one of these programs you should look for ones that say they are 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) type so you can design your pages without having to write the code.

Before you start designing your pages just take a minute to draw out a diagram of how your site will work e.g.

Back to Index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Index

On a web site you must select which of your pages will be the Home page that is to say the page that appears when the site is first opened and is the center for the site navigation. When this page is selected it must be called a special name so the clients, you and I, know what to ask for. There are two names that can be used either Index.html or Default.html.

So for example we select our home page and name it Index.html, now it is necessary to put links on the page so our visitors can move to and from other pages on the site. These links are called Hyperlinks and they can point to pages in your web site or to pages on another site all together. Hyperlinks Hyperlinks are special text in your document, which appears underlined and if clicked on will automatically display the page referred to in the underlined text. E.g.

The above are all example of methods to allow the user to navigate to the index page of our web site.

URL (Universal Resource locator)

In order to understand these it is first necessary to have an idea about web addressing. The reference that you type into the top line of a browser to get to a particular web site is called a Universal Resource locator (URL). Your site will be called by one of these names.

The actual URL is in three sections: -

The first part tells the computers that what follows is in hyper text transfer protocol (http) this is just a method of sending your requests and web pages between computers so they all know how to deal with them.

Second part indicated that what follows is a World Wide Web address.

The third part is the name of your site and is referred to as a Domain Name, it is your domain or area on the Internet. This name must be unique, as we have said before.

All sections of this address are separated by a dot character.

There is one more matter to cover in relation to URL's that is, relevant path. This is the same as your file structure on your computer in that each storage device has a root address e.g. C:\. is the root address for the C hard drive.

In the case of a web site the root address is the site name e.g. http://www.jr-websites.co.uk and then by placing a slash '/' followed by a file name you will be asking to see that file. Web site pages that are all in the same site can be called by just stating the file name as the server will only be expecting to sent out pages from the site you have connected to.

If however you wish to refer to a page on a different site then you must call it using the full address. Now we understand something of web addresses it will be easier to make hyperlinks. To recap if we are going to point to another page within the same site then the name of the page is all that is required not forgetting the extension i.e. '.html'.

Hyperlinks

To make a link to the prices page for example all that is necessary is to attach a web address to the text.

If using Microsoft Word for example:-

Type 'Click here for prices'  or what ever text you wish the user to see
Then highlight it
Select hyperlink from the insert menu
In the URL box type 'prices.html' or the name of the page you want the user to be able to jump to.

Putting the web site on to the Internet server.

In order to send your site to the server that is to host your site you need a special type of Internet connection. This connection has to be made using another type of protocol called a file transfer protocol. This is just another type of rules used by the computers to transfer files, web pages, up to the Internet server. We do not have to understand this to use it as programs are available to take care of all the tricky things.

There are many programs available to do this one of them is Cute ftp which can be downloaded as a trial from :-

Cute FTP .

You can click on this link to download the trial program.

Another program is Coffecup Directftp this can be downloaded from :-

Coffeecup DirectFTP

You can click on this link to download the trial program.

Initially we may be able to assist in this process, so if you have problems please e-mail us.

We will be doing articles on various subjects as time goes on, one of these will be on the use of cute ftp so please check this site regularly.

Back to Index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Index