Getting Started 17
Understanding Web sites
What's involved in creating a Web site?
It can be as simple as choosing and customizing a Web template... or you can
start from scratch—it's up to you. Either way, you'll appreciate the ease with
which WebPlus lets you revise text, graphics and adjust the design of each
page. WebPlus gives you the freedom to lay out page elements in any
composition that suits you. It's a bit like putting together a newsletter—so if
you're already comfortable with the basics of DTP, you'll find it easy going. If
you're just beginning, you can learn to use WebPlus tools as you go.
WebPlus lets you assemble all the elements of your site-in-progress into one
convenient, multi-page document that can be saved in a single step as a
WebPlus project file. At any time—again with just one step—you can publish
the project as a separate set of pages that comprise your Web site.
What exactly is a Web site?
The Internet is a global network that interconnects computers around the
world. The Web began as a way of using the Internet to access information
stored in a file format known as HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language.
Broadly defined, a Web site is a collection of (mostly) HTML files stored on a
file server that someone with a Web browser can get to. Actually, Web sites
don't depend on the Internet at all—they can be (and often are) accessed just
as well over a local area network or private intranet. Remember, a Web site is
just a collection of files.
The HTML format is a way of describing the layout of a page. An HTML file
uses plain text with various embedded codes to describe a page that somebody
has designed, consisting of text and clickable hypertext links. Besides HTML
files, a Web site generally includes other files (pictures, for example) that the
designer has seen fit to incorporate. A Web browser such as Microsoft
Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox is a program that can read an HTML file
and display the page (one hopes) the way the designer intended it to look
Typically, a Web site has a single Home Page using a standard file name like
INDEX.HTML. The Home Page is the first page a visitor sees. It usually will
contain links to other pages on the site, which in turn have links to others.
