Internet
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Create a Homepage (HTML etc.)

given at Young Leader's Institute, Heart's Bend World Children's Center, August '97

Prerequisites: Basic Computer skills, e-mail, using the WWW (surfing)

The Internet is the basic infrastructure that connects millions of computers (servers) all over the world. Various services use this underlying network: e-mail (e.g. mike@chef.net, used for one-to-one communication), WWW (e.g. http://www.yahoo.com used for document retrieval), IRC (on-line chat), Newsgroups (e.g. news:alt.soc.simpson for one-to-many communication), FTP (file transfer), RealAudio (on-line radio) etc.

Your computer at home connects to the Internet by using a modem (device connecting computer to phone line) and calling a local provider. This is establishing an on-line connection. Because the provider's server is connected to other servers, which are connected to others, your home computer can "talk" to any other server on the Internet, send e-mail and send or receive files. Computers at university or office might be permanently connected to the Internet, therefore not needing modem and provider.

2. Basics about creating a Homepage

To put yourself information to the WWW, you need to create a homepage. Unfortunately, you can usually not write your WWW documents with the word processor you are used to, such as Word or Works.

Documents to be published on the WWW need to be written in a special language: HTML. There are programs that simplify the creation of HTML documents, though, called HTML editors. Some new word processors such as MS Word '97 even include HTML converters. In this course, though, we will learn how to write in HTML "from scratch". This means using a plain text editor such as SimpleText (Mac) or Notepad (Windows).

As your computer might not be permanently connected to the Internet (the page cannot be accessed if you are not on-line) you want to store your pages on a web-server. Maybe your school has a web-server where they allow you to publish some pages. Maybe you want to use one of the free web-servers, e.g. http://www.geocities.com. Maybe you even want to rent disc space on a commercial web-server. (Allows to have shorter, nicer, addresses such as http://www.myproject.com and gives you more control and access statistics.)

Once you created a local HTML page and found a server to store it on, the only thing to do is transferring the local page to the server. This makes it available for everyone. Often, this is done by using an FTP program. You will need an account (login & password) for your server.

The following abbreviations concern technical details that you do not need to know about to be a web publisher: PPP, TCP/IP, HTTP and many more. On the other hand, things like HTML forms, CGI scripts, JavaScript or even Java are more advanced WWW techniques which you might want to learn more about later to create more sophisticated web pages.

3. HTML Tutorial

We will now have a closer look at how to write in HTML. HTML is a text format. It uses so called tags to indicate the structure (e.g. chapters, paragraphs) and outlook (e.g. centered, bold) of a document.

As an example, we will write this document itself (part of it) step by step in HTML: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Create a Homepage </TITLE>
</HEAD>
 
<BODY>
<CENTER>
<H1>Create a Homepage (HTML etc.)</H1>
<H3>Young Leader's Institute</H3>
Prerequisites: Basic Computer skills, using the WWW (surfing)
</CENTER>
 
<HR>
<H2>1. Internet Background</H2>
The Internet is the basic infrastructure that connects millions of computers (servers) all over the world. (...)
 
<H2>2. Basics about creating a Homepage</H2>
To put yourself information to the WWW, you need to create a homepage.
<P>As your computer might not be permanently connected (...)
 
<H3>References</H3>
The standard HTML Tutorial (very good & recommended) is the
<A HREF="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html">
NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML</A>
 
<HR>
<ADDRESS>
Michael Vorburger, <A HREF="mailto:mike@chef.net">mike@chef.net</A>
</ADDRESS>
 
</BODY>
</HTML>

This example does not cover HTML features such as Colors, Images, Tables & Frames etc.

4. Design a good Homepage

You are now able to create a homepage on the WWW. One important issue remains to be discussed, though: Having understood the technical background does not automatically lead to good homepages.

Any serious project will consist not only of one homepage, but rather of an entire Web Site. A Site consists of many inter-linked pages, having one homepage as starting point.

The design (content, not graphic) is similar to printed documents such as magazines: You need to carefully think about who your audience is, what you want to present to them, and in which way. General guidelines are: Keep pages short, split up a long page in a main page containing TOC or index and more chapter files. Keep your pages simple & light, write short sentences, start new paragraphs. Finally: Use Links! The concept of hypertext is the essence of what made the web so popular & cool. Studies have shown that the first thing people notice & read on a web page are those fancy blue underlined words, the hypertext links.

Exercise

Explain the key expressions and ideas in bold in your own words.

Project

If you are interested, we could create a sample homepage about our program together.

References

The best way to learn about the Internet is to use it. There is no book which provides as much in-depth information, links to interesting sites, tutorials etc. than the Internet itself. The standard HTML Tutorial (very good & recommended) can be found at: NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML [EXTERNAL]

For anything else, simply use Yahoo! [EXTERNAL] or any other search engine, surf around and keep your eyes open, study the source code of other pages (in Netscape: Menu View/Source) or send me an e-mail with a question!

This website was designed by Michael Vorburger [EXTERNAL].
Last modified: 18-Okt-97 <yli@vorburger.ch [E-MAIL]>