Starting to develop a website Learning Aim C

Introduction Once your site design is complete, the next step is to make the actual pages and link them together to create your website.

Use appropriate software tools and techniques You can write HTML code with a simple text editor such as Notepad but creating sophisticated web pages is quite difficult. Web developers tend to use web development software such as Adobe® Dreamweaver®. You will also need access to a graphics - editing software (such as Adobe® Photoshop®) to prepare the images for your web pages.

Gathering and storing the assets for your web page Eventually your website will be uploaded on a web server, and so it is important to create a folder where all the files for your site will be saved. Saving web pages and graphics and other elements you will use in your website in all sorts of different locations will not work when you upload your site to a server. This is why it is important to create a folder for all your site files at the outset.

Gathering and storing the assets for your web page The design you created for your website should list the various assets you need, such as images, animations, video and sound files. You should now gather all these assets together and place them in a subfolder inside your site folder. You will need to create any assets that aren't ready-made digital assets yourself. You will also need to prepare text for your web pages and have ready any external links you need to include.

Naming your web pages Next you should save the empty page Dreamweaver® has created for you. The home page on any site needs to have the name 'lndex.html'. This also relates to when your pages are uploaded to a web server. Most web servers are set up to expect the first page in any website to be called 'lndex.html'.

Page properties You can set page properties, which will control things like the default font, font colour and background colour. You can also do the following:

Page properties Adding text. To add text to your web page, simply type in the design side of the screen display. You text will appear in the default font and colour chosen in the Page properties dialog box. You may have prepared your text in advance in which case you can copy and paste it in and then format it.

Page properties Headings and subheadings. The best way to format headings and subheadings in a web page is to use the heading tags. This makes it easier to apply and change the formatting to the whole site using CSS.