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Building a website can be as easy or
as hard as you want to make it.... it really depends on what you want to
display, how you want the website to function, and what tools you are
going to use to put it all together.
The Hard Way
If you really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of web design, and
building websites from scratch, then you will have to learn HTML (Hyper
Text Markup Language). HTML is a programming language that Internet
Browsers (i.e. Microsoft Internet Explorer) know how to interpret. HTML
files are simply text files that are given a file extension like .html, .htm,
or .php (there are many other extensions that browsers can interpret), but
the main ones for webpages are .htm and .html. If you create a text
document in a text editor (like NotePad.exe.... free with Microsoft
Windows), and call it anything.html, then an Internet Browser will be able
to open it, and you'll see a webapge.
The Easy Way
For most people just starting out, the best and quickest way to build a
website is to use a 3rd party software program. Probably the most popular
website building program today is
Microsoft
FrontPage. It is not free (something like $160 US), but makes building
a website almost as easy as typing a Microsoft Word document. Another
popular program is
Macromedia Dreamweaver. If you don't want to spend much money on a web
design program, then check out software download sites like Download.com.
There are hundreds of tools available to help make building your website
as effortless as possible.
In fact, click here for a current list of web design software (or HTML
editors) available for download at Download.com.
Once you've got your website
designed, you'll want to publish it (or upload it) to the internet.
Click
here to learn how to upload your website to the internet. |