Introduction to
website development
website development and designers create the websites that makeup the Internet. These series of articles are meant to introduce web development and provide resources but not replace the benefits of taking a course through one of your local education centres.
The previous page is an example of what can happen to a
website if to proper steps are not followed?
At a very basic level the Internet is one computer connected to another computer through a phone line, cable or wireless signal; communicating with each other. Add to this the ability to connect to any other computer and communicate with it in fractions of a second and you have the Internet in a nutshell. The terms 'net' or 'web' are a way of visualizing this interconnectedness.
Basic Concepts
When working on a website there are a couple of key concepts that need to be understood.
The local computer is the one you work on to develop your website. The remote computer or server is the one that contains website and serves up the web pages to your visitors. For security reasons servers require you to log on before you can work on them.
Always consider the file on the server to be the original copy as this is the one that visitors will see. If you need to make changes to a existing web page retrieve a copy of the original from the website first. If more than one person is updating the website this will avoid overwriting someone else's changes. This also allows you to test the new page(s) before publishing it to the website.
Hypertext Markup Language or HTML is the language that is at the core of all document on the Internet. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee. The language has evolved to work with the larger XML language. Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) allows developers to build websites that take advantage of this broader language. An HTML or XHTML document is a text document with instructions for browsers on how to display the web page (Note: HTML and XHTML are used interchangeably through these documents). Hyperlinks tie all the documents together to integrating the website and connecting it to the rest of the "Net".
