Building a Website

If you have read the previous page and created your first web page then it's now time to expand on your knowledge and build your first website.

What is a website ?

A website is just a group of web pages connected together using something called a link.

In HTML there is a special tag called the 'link' tag, and it looks like this in its most basic form:

<a href=""> </a>

And here is an example of the link tag with a destination filled in:

<a href=" http://www.info-sales.co.uk"> Go to info-sales.co.uk </a>

If you have ever surfed the internet then you are guaranteed to havel used links - whenever you click on a link that takes you to another page, you are using a link tag. The link tag is the most important tag in HTML - it is what makes the Internet what it is - millions of linked and interconnected web pages.

In the above example, we can see that the link tag points to the web site www.info-sales.co.uk and the text that is displayed on the web page is 'Go to info-sales.co.uk'.

So if you wanted to create a link that took someone to say www.yoursite.com , you would replace the www.info-sales.co.uk with www.yoursite.com.

Like all other tags, link tags have an opening tag (<a href=" http://info-sales.co.uk">) and a closing tag (</a>).

You may have noticed that there is some text in the link tag that comes before the web site address -

http://

This text tells a web browser that the link is pointing to a web page. Sometimes links can point to other things besides web pages, such as, PDF files, etc

The 2 Types of URL

Absolute URL

To link pages in your web site from one page to the next you have a choice of using one of two types of addresses - absolute addresses (complete) and relative addresses (partial).

To explain, URL refers to a web sites or web pages "name"

An absolute URL is the complete address of a page that can be found from any other location on the Internet. So let's say you have a page called contact.html on the root of your web site with a domain name of www.info-sales.co.uk . In this case, the absolute URL of the contact.html page would be -

'http://www.info-sales.co.uk/contact.html'

(The root of a web site, is the base of the web site - the starting level.)

The files (pages, images etc.) that make up your web site are organized in folders just like any other files on your home computer's hard drive. Your host will allocate you an area on their server for you to place all your websites' files.

The area assigned to you on their server will be the 'root' of your web site. This means that as far as the Internet is concerned, anything (html files, images other folders etc) in this folder is directly accessible by pointing a browser at your domain name plus the name of the item.

Let's say that on the root level of your website, you had these HTML files -

Index.html and Contact.html

And in a folder called 'products', you placed all the pages of items you were selling, with one called 'autoebay.html'.

You decided to put all your 'product' HTML pages into a 'products' folder to keep the web site more organized - can you guess what the absolute URL would be for the web page 'bookcases.html' ?

For the domain name: 'www.info-sales.co.uk' it would be:

http://www.info-sales.co.uk/products/autoebay.html

Relative URL

A relative URL is a partial address that is relative to the page where you placed your link. So if you were linking from the index.html page of this web site to the autoebay.html page your relative URL (address) would be:

/products/autoebay.html

And the actual link tag would look like this:

<a href="/products/bookcases.html"> Automate delivery of your ebooks with Outlook Express. </a>

You are basically telling the browser that the HTML page we want to load is in the products folder. Play around with links and folders on your own web site and things will become very clear - if you get the address wrong it won't load !