I believe that one of the reasons the internet has grown so quickly is because it introduces people to ideas, opinions, products, services, entertainment and art that most conventional organizations will not be bothered to promote or sell. Some of these reasons are political, and most are commercial; hence blogs and personal websites are a good outlet for providing information and service to a very niche market.
Let’s say you decide to go down the path of having your own website, and that you don’t want to use the standard template that the service provider has. So what should you do next? Get a professional web designer to do it for you? What if you want to do it yourself, is that possible? Undoubtedly, my website is not the coolest thing on the web, although I am proud to say that apart from the Google Ads, GDI banners and articles from other writers, everything else is my own. Yes, even those strange looking drawings.
That being said, hyper text markup language (html) is not the kind of stuff you can learn in a day. There are some very good educational sites that will teach you how to code for free. I use three basic scripts for this site: HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets) and JavaScript.
For those of us used to the convenience of Microsoft Word, coding in HTML can be a bit overwhelming, so the quick way out is to design your site on a Word document then save it as a HTML file. That was what I used to do, but this technique tend to generate long strings of extra codes that are very specific to the program, so now I use a text file which helps me focus only on the basic codes. Each time I want to create a new webpage, I open a text file, line up the codings specified in the HTML tutorial site, and when I save it, I will change the file extension from txt to html. Don't understand what I am saying? Open a notepad file, and type in whatever you want, then when you save it change the file extension. You will find that the file you saved is now a webpage.
Does this mean that each time you want to change how the fonts look, or how the lists and paragraphs should be aligned, you have to re-edit the information in every single page? No, you don’t. There is such a thing called CSS that you can edit and put into one file. Again you don’t need a special program, because you can just change the .txt file extension to a .css and it will be done. Then whenever you need to change anything, just open the file as text and do your work. The time saving advantage is obvious but you need to do a lot of planning for this one. Sometimes a small change can make a big difference. For example, one time a visitor told me that the fonts on my site are too small. I know I can always tell him to change the view of his screen, but imagine how many visitors I would have lost among those who don’t complain. All I did was increase the font size in my css file by 1 point, and every page on my site reflected this change.
Then of course there is Javascript, which I use for my top and bottom row links, for switching pictures and quotes on my Homepage, and for sending out links to my articles as well as for quizzes in my English and Math sections. I adore JavaScript, and the fact that it is client-based means anything that my visitors type in will not be collected by my server folder, so I won’t be collecting private data.
You can practice by building a webpage in your personal computer, including how to use Meta tags in HTML which is important, since it carries information which Search Engines can use to find you. Create a folder, and name it after your dream domain name, then build another folder inside this one and name it index_files. I don’t build any other folders in my main folder. The reason is pretty simple, if I do that then I will have to rewrite a lot of links in my other webpages. I put all my css and js files in the index_files then tell the webpages where to find them. If I move any webpage to a different folder, I will have to re-do the link, else the commands will not be found. So to keep things simple, I only have one folder. But of course, if you want to make things complicated, that is your right too. Just make sure you practise first.
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