Web Design - 2nd Edition

1-1 Introduction

So you have decided to design your web pages yourself! Good decision. So let's start quickly.
Web pages are ordinary files with .htm or .html file extensions. They contain a code named "hyper text mark-up language" or html. This codes when viewed in a browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape will be seen as beautiful web pages however code under web page may be complicated.

To design an html web page you have two options:

a. You can use a web page editor like Microsoft FrontPage to create web pages. It works exactly like Microsoft word (a complicated editor program used for creating and editing book, letter etc pages.) You just type text, insert graphics and finally save your document as an html web page. By the way word 2000 itself can save your existing documents as html pages.

So you see designing a web page can be very easy. But soon you will see that this is not a good option for creating a professional web page.

b. Second option is to learn html codes and write html pages in a simple text editor. As we said your codes will be seen as WebPages when viewed in a web browser.

1-2 Reasons for choosing second option

- If you want to design professional web pages using these tools will not be enough. You must be familiar with html codes.

- Results of these editors are big and sometimes chaotic code. Maintaining this code is very difficult.- If you want to design dynamic web pages in future you will need to know html codes.
- If you will need forms in your pages to send information to server and return result pages back to browser you will need to know html codes.

- There are other reasons that dictate us to learn html coding and not satisfy with these tools.

1-3 Tools you will need

You will need a simple text editor to write html codes. For example you can use notepad in windows or any text editor in other operating systems. You will also need a browser like Internet explorer or Netscape Navigator. In this course we will assume that you are working in windows 9X/NT/2000.
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