Learning Aim C

 Creating web pages involves many considerations.  In this section we will look at the different software tools you can use and how to create the navigation for your website.

 There are a number of different ways you can create web pages.

 You can type the HTML (HyperTextMarkup Language) code used to format a web page into a simple text editor like Microsoft® Notepad®.  This is a good way to get familiar with HTML.  However, writing and editing HTML like this is fiddly and not well suited to complex pages.

 HTML is essentially a set of instructions which is sent to a web browser, telling it how to format a web page.  These instructions are in the form of tags.  Different tags tell the browser to format text, images or tables in different ways.  For example, if you want some text to appear in bold, you use the tag, and to switch off bold you use the tag.

 In order to develop dynamic websites, web developers designed tools that were more sophisticated than HTML.  DHTML (Dynamic HyperText Markup Language) is a general term for several technologies used to create interactive websites, including CSS (cascading style sheets), which we will look at later in this chapter, and JavaScript.

 Many web developers use Dreamweaver® to create websites.

 You will want to include navigation links to other pages in your site and also to external websites.  The pages you want to link to don't have to be complete, but they must exist.

 Many websites include some kind of menu bar, whether across the top or down the side of the page.  This is to provide a consistent method of navigating around the site.  The menus can be simple hyperlinks or more complex menus using forms with drop-down menus or scripts.  Forms and scripts are covered later in this unit.

 Hyperlinks are one of the key features of the World Wide Web in that they allow links to be made from one page to another.  Visitors to web pages can then follow the hyperlinks (by clicking on them) to take them to another page.  Hyperlinks which link to another page within the same site are called internal hyperlinks, while those that link to a page on a different site are called external hyperlinks.  A hyperlink can simply be some text on the page, or an image such as a button.  Hyperlinks within text are normally shown by underlined text of a different colour to the standard text on the page.

 You can also create a link to a place within a page.  This is useful if you have a long page and want to create a link to different subjects or headings within the same page.