WEB BASICS: WHAT IS THE WEB? The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

The Internet – History and Stats  Early versions were created by the US Department of Defense  1989 – researchers want to share data  Tim Berners-Lee  Technology available to the public domain in 1993 

What’s on the Internet?  Search engines  Blogs  Wiki’s  Podcasts  Social Networking Sites  What have you been involved with?

Internet Basics  Home Page – Usually the first page of a website that acts like a table of contents for the site.  Some sites have Entry Pages  Web Browser – You must have this to view web pages  Examples: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari  NOT ALL WEB BROWSERS SHOW PAGES THE SAME WAY.

Web Browser Usage Stats

Web Addresses and URL’s  Web Address – all pages have one, just like our houses have addresses  URL – Uniform Resource Locator: another name for a web address

Web Addresses and URL’s  Web Address – all pages have one, just like our houses have addresses  URL – Uniform Resource Locator: another name for a web address Hyper Text Transfer Protocol – tells you the page your are on is on the World Wide Web. Can also be ftp:// which allows you to use the Internet to transfer files.

Web Addresses and URL’s  Web Address – all pages have one, just like our houses have addresses  URL – Uniform Resource Locator: another name for a web address World Wide Web

Web Addresses and URL’s  Web Address – all pages have one, just like our houses have addresses  URL – Uniform Resource Locator: another name for a web address Domain Name – Who owns this site? Other examples are yahoo.com,Toyota.com. You buy these!

Web Addresses and URL’s  Web Address – all pages have one, just like our houses have addresses  URL – Uniform Resource Locator: another name for a web address The path that tells the browser where to find your Web page, after finding the domain name.

Top Level Domains (e.g.:.com)  Shows the nature of the web site  Other abbreviations: .net – network organization .org – usually non-profits .edu – educational (usually post-secondary) .gov – government .mil – military  Country Codes – example:  Jp (Japan), ca (Canada), uk (United Kingdom)  Find any country code in the “Root Zone Database”

HTML: The Language of the Web

HTML  Hyper Text Markup Language – we will learn this!  Syntax – the rules of the language  These have changed over time  Current version is 5.0  HTML rules and standards (syntax) was developed by the W3C – World Wide Web Consortium 

HTML Documents  Consists of 2 things  Document Content  HTML Tags  Save as filename.html or filename.htm Document Content  Opening Tag  Closing Tag  One sided vs. two sided  Tags are NOT case sensitive, but standard is to capitalize

Publishing and Hosting Finding a home for your site

Find a host  If you leave your finished files on your computer, no one will ever see your site.  Find a “host” who can store your files on a server.  Usually, you will FTP your files to your host.  The space on the server for your files is usually not free, so expect to spend some money.

Find a domain name  Many companies can sell you a domain name  Master list is used throughout the world  Usually sales are in yearly increments  What’s available??  Try searching the web for it now  Sometimes name is taken, but not used  Have to use the WhoIs database to find out who has registered for the name you want   My favorite is:

Partner Activity  With a partner, think of a domain name that you want to try to “buy” (school appropriate, please!) 1. Write your domain name.  Look on the web and find two places you might try to use to buy the domain and host the site from. 2. List these two sites. 3. Answer the following questions: a. What does your domain name cost for each place? b. How much is hosting a small site going to run for each place? c. Which one would you choose to host your site? Why?  Print and hand into the basket. Be sure ALL names are on the paper!