This may help you to
Visualize Your Web Hosting
I want you to VISUALIZE your web site. Or somebody else’s web site if you
don’t have yours, yet.
I think that the reason that those of you who don’t yet have a web site
don’t have one, yet, is because it sounds complicated. It’s not.
If you visualize a web site, it becomes much simpler. It becomes
approachable. Once you visualize it it is easier to do it yourself. It’s
easy, follow me, I’ll show you.
Where are your .doc (Word) documents?
On your computer, probably in My Documents folder.
Folders used to be called directories. Someone thought it would be easier
for us to visualize directories if we thought of them as file folders. I
think they were right. Another reason that I want you to visualize your
web site.
Now you have probably created Word documents and saved them many times.
Word put the document into your My Documents file. Word knew where to save
it, how to save it and did it for you automatically! That’s the way things
should work. If you want to see the letter, for instance, that you wrote,
you start Word and select the file and Word displays it for you.
Where are your .html documents (your web pages)?
On the webserver at your Hosting Company’s server Farm, right? Sure.
You use a program to create the document. Let’s say you chose Microsoft’s
FrontPage, which is my favorite. So you start FrontPage, you create the
web page and tell FrontPage to save it locally to your computer. FrontPage
has a preference for the location to store these .htm or .html documents
and that is in the My Webs folder which is inside your My Documents
folder. Later, if you want to see it you can start FrontPage, look at
Recent Files, as you probably do in Word and open the web page again in
FrontPage.
But, you can also open that web page in your Web Browser (Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer is the most popular). If you start IE (Internet
Explorer) and type the location of the web page in the address box, it
will open it and display it as a web page.
Now IE doesn’t care where the document is – local or online- you just tell
it the location and Bingo! it loads a copy into memory and displays it on
your monitor.
What’s a web page?
Just a document with a .htm or .html extension like hello.htm or
hello.html. In the days of DOS, you could only have 8.3 names. That is 8
characters in the first part and 3 in the part after the period which is
called the file extension. We have now overcome that limitation and can
have more characters in the name and the extension. I recommend you get
used to the .htm and always use it as the extension for all your web
pages. If you use .html and try to display it by typing only .htm, you
will get an error!
The .htm document is written with “tags” which are ways of “coding” into
the .htm document instructions telling Web Browsers how to display the
text which is between the beginning tag and the ending tag. Whether the
text is bold or red or centered or whatever. Many html editors will not
require that you know this code. They will create it for you based on the
way you type it into that editor. If you put in centered, red, bolded
text, it will automatically add the appropriate tags when it creates the
.htm document.
By the way, there is plenty of code in Word documents also to tell Word
how to display the document. To see some, when you have a Word document
open, press and hold CTRL and SHIFT keys and press the 8 key (the one with
the asterisk *). Do that again to get rid of them.
But back to .htm documents. They exist as plain text documents which don’t
have all the formatting information like Word. They are simpler. The tags
are visible in plain text also. <HTML> is the start tag and </HTML> is the
end tag. Everything between those tags is formatted according to that tag.
Graphics and Pictures
If there are graphics, pictures on the web page the you will see code like
this
<IMG SRC="http://www.mysite.com/logo.gif" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="120" ALT=""
BORDER="0" ALIGN="LEFT">
In this case, the image is obtained from the source location and displayed
by the browser.
So for text and graphics the browser goes to the location of the web page
it loads a copy into your computers memory, and displays it in your
Browser window in much the same way that Word would do for a letter. Each
web page is another .html document. So if you have 12 web pages on a web
site, there are 12 html documents on the webserver. In addition, if there
are images, the usual way would be to have the image files, such as
logo.gif above on your webserver.
So all in all it’s easy to think of your web site as a group of files in a
folder on a computer somewhere else. That’s really your web site. Just a
group of files on the webserver.
While the number of steps involved for that file to get to the person over
the Internet are many, involving many pieces of hardware and software, it
works! And it all works automatically. You ask to see http://mywebsite.com/index.html
or c:\mywebsite.com\index.html in your browser and the browser finds the
file and displays it for you. They will be displayed identically. The file
that the first displays resides on a webserver at your hosting company the
other one is on your local computer.
Notice that there are slashes ( / ) in web based resources and backslashes
( \ ) in resources on your computer.
It is really this simple.
A visitor simply enters your website address into his browser and in a few
seconds, the page, the .html document is shown on his computer. You
created the web page, sent it to your webserver and from there it is
available for others to view.
Use the new version of FrontPage 2003
Microsoft has available a trial edition of FrontPage 2003. You can get it
for $7.95, shipping and handling here
http://www.microsoft.com/office/frontpage/prodinfo/trial.mspx
If you are in a hurry get Netscape Composer which I like a lot and you can download it for free and get started with it today!
http://dollarware-hosting.com/composer.html
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View the html code for any web page
You can see this code on any webpage that displays in your browser by
right-clicking the web page and choosing View Source from the popup menu.
More email is being sent in html format. If you right click on an email
and get that popup menu, it is in html format and you can view the source
the same way that you view the source of a web page. But email is another
story.