Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2. Creating Your First Page

Web pages are the basic unit of a website, and every website is a collection of one or more pages. The ideal web page contains enough information to fill the width of a browser window, but not so much that readers need to scroll from morning until lunchtime to get to the page’s end. In other words, the ideal page strikes a balance: It avoids the lonely feeling caused by too much white space, as well as the stress induced by an avalanche of information.

The best way to get a handle on what a web page should hold is to look at your favorite websites. A news site like www.nytimes.com displays every news article on a separate page (and subdivides longer stories into several pages). At an e-commerce shop like www.amazon.com, every product has its own page. Similarly, a personal website like www.MyUndyingLoveForPigTrotters.com could be divided into separate web pages with titles like “About Me,” “Vacation Photos,” and “Top-Secret Recipes for Pig Parts.”

For now, don’t worry too much about how to divide your website into pages; you’ll revisit that task in Chapter 8 when you start linking pages together. Instead, your first goal is to understand how a basic web page works and how to create one of your own. That’s what you’ll do in this chapter. On the way, you’ll learn the essential details of the most important standard in website design: HTML.

Introducing HTML: The Language of the Web

Web pages are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It doesn’t ...