Web Authoring Basics
What is a Webpage, Really?
It sounds like some nebulous entity—“cyberspace”. But actually a website is just a collection of files located on a computer that is connected to the internet so others can access it.
The computers that these files are on are called servers because they “serve” the files when other computers request them (like your computer, when you are browsing a site). You could theoretically do this from your own computer—but because you like to turn your computer off sometimes or have to restart it, it wouldn't work very well as a server because servers need to be on all the time so your webpage can be “up” all the time. So companies have super-powerful computers dedicated only to being on all the time and serving out these files. (Servers also have to run certain software to make it all work, but these are the basics.) This is called web hosting.
Webpages themselves are HTML files, and they (usually) end in “.html” (or .htm, it doesn't matter). These are plain-text files. You can write them in Notepad, which is Windows own text-editor. They are written in a certain code, called HTML. All the pretty designs and colors come in when a browser, like Netscape or Internet Explorer interprets the code and displays it a certain way (you need to change the extension from .txt to .html in order for browsers to recognize them as HTML files). The HTML code itself is pretty simple. For example, if you write in your HTML file:
<b>Make this bold!</b>then Netscape will know that you want the text between the <b> tags to be bold. There are many tags that do different things in HTML—one to insert a picture, another to make a link, and tables to lay out everything.
You can easily see the HTML code of any page you go to (including this one) by either right-clicking and choosing “View Source”, “View Page Source” or clicking on “View” on the top menu and choosing “Source” or “Page Source”. You can see for instance, that this paragraph has the <p> tag before it, to make it a new paragraph. And you can see that I have to spell out the <tags> with codes so the browser doesn't interpret them when I want them to be displayed. The <code> tags just make the code display in a monospaced font.
If you see something interesting, you can select and copy the code to Notepad, save the file, change the extension to .html, and then open it in your browser. Then edit the code, save it, and reload it in the browser and see what changed. Experimenting is an excellent way to learn. There are also a number of tutorials out there that will explain all the HTML tags and how to use them.