Now that your computer is all ready
for building your site, what about you? Are YOU
ready?
If
you already have some basic knowledge about how to code a website
in HTML, you're in pretty good shape to get started. If you
have already coded your own web sites, that's wonderful. If
you know ASP, and PHP, and XHTML, and CSS, and every other letter
in the alphabet, and you love to manually code your own sites, and
Microsoft calls you whenever their engineers need help, you can
skip the rest of this lesson and proceed to the next topic.
But if you have never tried to do any coding before, then kindly
continue reading.
Perhaps you have heard it said that there are
site-building software programs now that make it completely
unnecessary for anybody to have to bother with learning code, since
the programs will do all of the coding for you. They are
commonly referred to as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
programs. You may already be using one of these
programs. Perhaps their advertisements convinced
you:
"Just point and click on the
screen! You'll NEVER have to learn ANYTHING about
code!"
If
you believe that, we would love to sell you the Taj Mahal and the
Vatican, both of which we own. (Sarcasm
intended.)
The
WYSIWYG site-building programs (Microsoft FrontPage,
Macromedia Dreamweaver, and others) are much improved over
earlier versions. They can be very useful and wonderful
time-savers. They can help you put together a web site in a
relatively short period of time. Despite howls of protests
from coding purists, not everyone has the time to code out a
multi-page site character-by-character in Notepad (a simple text
editor in MS Windows), even if they could. They wouldn't do
that any more than they would build their own automobile
part-by-part instead of buying one from a
dealership.
But
although the site-building tools are much better than they used to
be, they can still have their problems. They can write some
cluttered, clunky code, they can do quirky things that you can't
fix by pointing and clicking on the screen, and they can add
special proprietary coding which makes it difficult for people with
disabilities to read your site. Sometimes, the only way to
fix a particular problem is to go into the code and manually change
it. To be able to do that, you will have to learn at least
basic HTML (Hypertext Markup
Language, which is the basic computer language used to make web
pages and web sites).
Fortunately, basic HTML is not at all difficult to learn. At
its simplest, it uses a system of tags surrounding text, with commands that tell your
browser where to find particular graphics or information and how to
arrange them on the screen.
It is beyond the scope of this lesson to present you with basic
HTML instruction. There are many books and other web sites
that can instruct you in as much depth and detail as you
wish. If you intend to use one of the WYSIWYG site-building
utilities, it really is not necessary to become a coding
expert. (We will probably take some abuse for saying
that. But we stand by that statement.) You should,
however, understand the basic structure of HTML code and how pages
are constructed, and know where to find the answers to any
questions you may have about a particular tag or section of
code.
After you have built and maintained a web site for a while, you
may well find yourself become a coding expert
anyway!
