What is a Website?

A website is a collection of individual but related web pages that are often stored together and hosted by a web server. Web pages can include different objects such as text, sound, video and still images. A web page is created using 3 layers:

  • the content layer (Hyper Text Markup Language - HTML) - the builder
  • the presentation layer (Cascading Style Sheets - CSS) - the artist
  • the behaviour layer (Javascript) - the wizard

WHAT IS HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is a text based language used to develop the content layer of websites. HTML files can be written directly using a simple text editor such as Notepad on a Windows machine or textEdit on a Mac.

Web Authoring Packages like Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visual Studio are called What You See if What You Get (WYSWYG) editors, and can be used to build websites without typing in all the HTML yourself.

THE 2 EDPUZZLE VIDEOS BELOW EXPLAIN IN MORE DETAIL AND INCLUDE SOME QUESTIONS TO HELP CHECK UNDERSTANDING..

How is Website Code structured?

If you prefer to read, here is the same information in text form.

GETTING STARTED WITH HTML

HTML is not really a programming language. It is a markup language that uses a set of markup TAGS to describe a web page to the browser, HTML tags are shown using angle brackets around them like this:

<html>

The angle brackets tell the browser that this is a markup tag and not to put the text inside on the web page. Most HTML commands have two tags: One to open the command and open to close it. The closing tag includes a backslash, for example:

<html></html>

All HTML Documents start with a <!DOCTYPE html> tag that tells the browser that the page is written in HTML instead of a different markup language.

The first tag that will usually appear in any web page will be <html>. This tag tells the browser that the markup following this tag will be written in hypertext markup language. At the end of the webpage will be a </html> tag that tells the browser the HTML is ending.

Each web page has 2 sections the head and the body.

The head section contains the website Title, which is the name displayed in the Browser toolbar. It also contains Meta information which can help search engines find the web page.

The head section should always contain a Title. This is the name displayed in the browser toolbar. It is the page title used if a page is added to your bookmarks and the title displayed in search engine results.

The body section contains all the information that will be displayed on the Website.