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Creating your own Web site will be less daunting if you understand the nature of the Internet and the World Wide Web. We explain. by Webs? What are we, spiders? Well, sort of. Browsing the
World Wide Web can snag you lots of information, more than you might expect. Plus, with your own Web site, you can get folks' attention from virtually anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. You don't have to know much about the "Web," or how it works, to browse fairly successfully. But if you're planning to create a Web "site," you might find it less daunting if you understand what you're dealing with. With your own Web site, anyone with Web browser software
and a connection to the Internet can find the Web pages you publish. Your site can be an advertisement for you or your organization. It can be an on-line newsletter, a catalog of goods or services, a customer support vehicle, or an employee or sales management system for remote offices. Think of what you're doing via brochures, catalogs, faxes, and forms, and chances are you can do a lot of it more efficiently over the Internet, and the World Wide Web, in
particular. But what's the Web? Read on. At its most basic, you can think of the World Wide Web as a special document delivery service that runs over the world's largest computer network, the Internet—the fabled global "electronic superhighway." Don't blanch at the word "network!" You use plenty of "networks" in your daily life: the telephone network, your cable TV network, your building's electrical network. But the everyday network that most resembles the Internet is the street running right outside your building. You've got
an address on that street. And it, and the other streets in your neighborhood or town, connect and eventually pour onto a wider street or highway. That highway connects to other neighborhoods or towns. And these highways eventually dump into higher-speed freeways that connect other main highways. And the freeways connect to airports and shipping ports that, in turn, cross the waters to connect to the freeways, highways (even donkey trails), and neighborhoods on other continents.
Think of each neighborhood or town as a network of streets. If you know the address you want, you can find a route to some other building clear across the world. Picture, then, the "highway network" as a network of networks. That's what the Internet is like. Interestingly, you can thank the former Soviet Union for the Internet. The forerunner of today's commercial Internet actually started in the '60s as a U.S. Defense department project. The desire was to create a communications system
that the Soviets couldn't easily bomb. Telephone networks were vulnerable because they relied on central switching points. Nuke the switch, and you close down large portions of the network. The Rand Corporation came up with the decentralized network concept. Instead of a strict hub-and-spoke phone-switch arrangement, you had a fish net arrangement. Communication lines crisscrossed and intersected, and messages were switched—or "routed"—from point to point in
many directions. If part of the "net" was destroyed, the "Net" (initially called ARPANET) could route messages around the disaster. The Internet gradually widened to serve nonmilitary research, and finally, commercial use. The National Science Foundation initially provided the high-speed "freeway" portions of the Internet, but now, as it has opened to commercial use, most of the main freeways are commercially owned. It's a complicated ownership, but basically, big-time
operators pay big bucks to telecommunications firms for a stretch of the highway, and then charge the rest of us by the minute or by the mile—so to speak. So we've got our Internet "superhighway. " Before the World Wide Web was launched, you could ship some fairly nuts-and-bolts text messages and files over it, in a
hard-to-use fashion. But imagine the Web as a new service arriving at your door, promising to deliver not just text, but pretty documents with headlines, graphics, sound, video, and click-on links to other documents and sites. Picture the new WWW service running in special trucks over the same Internet as the nuts-and-bolts stuff. But the new fancy stuff comes out of special warehouses, right to your door. That special service is the World Wide Web. And the
special fancy document warehouses are Web server computers, which handle the special requirements of the new service. Your door, of course, is your Web browser software. Like the Internet, private enterprise didn't play a big part in the creation of the World Wide Web. The Web came out of research begun in 1980 at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory) by Tim Berners-Lee. (Lee programmed the first "Web" software on Steve Job's NextStep operating system, on a Next UNIX cube.)
By the early '90s, the World Wide Web was poised. Several UNIX browsers were kicking around when Marc Andreessen of the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne) developed an easy-to-use browser for X-Windows, and then Microsoft Windows in 1993. Andreessen left NCSA and started his own browser company, Netscape Communications. The commercialization of the "Web" started in 1994, when only about 1,500 sites existed worldwide. For links to sites presenting Internet and Web history,
What's the difference between browsing a Web site and setting up one of your own? To browse a site, you first have to connect your computer to the Internet. Unless you want to pay a $1,000 or more a month to wire your home or office computers directly to the Internet, you'll generally use someone else's direct, high-speed Internet connection. That "someone else" is an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP pays the big bucks to have computers sitting right on the
Internet. To get from your home or office to the ISP, you use telephone lines and a modem. When you want to browse, or check your e-mail, you dial in—modem to modem—to your ISP. It connects you to the Internet and its Web service and also offers e-mail service. Once you're patched into the Internet—via your ISP—you start running your Web browser software. Browser software understands the language of World Wide Web traffic running on the Internet. It understands the rules that govern
Web-service traffic, known as the "transport" rules, or protocols. In browsing, you've noticed that each Web page has an address, listed as something like "http://www.netobjects.com." Ever wonder what "http" stands for? It means Hyper Text Transport Protocol. Placed at the beginning of the address, HTTP is saying "I want to make a Web-based connection over the Internet, to the following address. Handle the data transportation issues for
me." The rest of the address is called a Universal Resource Locator, or URL. Every page on the Internet can be reached by a specific URL. It's a pointer to a specific page, just like your street address is a pointer to where you live or work. Getting your own Web site means creating Web pages and
putting them where folks can find them over the Internet. Unlike browsing, your Web pages can't sit on your home or office computer, unless those are wired directly to the Internet. A modem connection from an ISP to Web pages on the computer just won't do the job. You'll need to rent disk space on your ISP's Web server computer. As we described above, a Web server is like a warehouse of Web pages sitting right on the Internet, ready to hop on and travel to
whomever needs them, courtesy of the HTTP service. That means that as long as the Web server is up and running, anyone in the world, practically, can visit those pages. If you're already paying for an Internet connection, your ISP can usually provide some Web server space. Many ISPs actually provide their e-mail customers with free Web server space for noncommercial Web pages—mine gives me 10MB.
Of course, the free route doesn't get you a very snazzy Web site address. To get to my humble, self-promotional site, for example, you have to browse for Also, as your site and the traffic to and from it grows, the fee
you'll pay someone for hosting your site will grow. Web server providers look at the total amount of data going to and from your site—the "bandwidth, " in tech talk. And they look at the amount of server disk space you use. The more you use, the more you'll pay. Sure, you've looked at Web pages. But what are they, under the hood, so to speak? For a clue, the next time you're browsing a Web site, click the View/Source in your browser. A window pops up with a bunch of funny looking text marked off between bracket characters (< and >, see the illustration). These codes are the basic language of Web pages, known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Your browser follows the coded instructions to display fancy-looking pages and to perform all the hyperlink jumps to other pages and sites.
Many pros I know actually build pages—or at least fine-tune them—by typing in and editing these codes directly. You don't want to do that, and, fortunately, you don't really have to.
Microsoft Word, for example, lets you save your documents as HTML-based Web pages—that's what I first used to build my own Web site. This way of working is called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML authoring: You design a document on screen so it looks like what you want. The program you're using then generates the necessary HTML to create a Web page that a Web browser such as Navigator 4 or Internet Explorer 4 can display in full glory.
In addition to Microsoft Word's HTML features, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe PageMaker, and many others convert documents to HTML. Navigator 4 includes a Web-authoring program, Netscape Composer, and Internet Explorer 4 bundles one called FrontPage Express. Both of these are great places to start to help you build nicely designed pages. Once you get beyond a few pages though, you need a site building system that also helps you view and maintain all the
hyperlinks between pages and the links to graphics files included in those pages. When you start wanting a professional-looking site with well-integrated graphic themes that look consistent from page to page, It provides very accurate layout control and also gets you into advanced techniques such as dynamic HTML and other stuff should you later want to go all the way. Note that A Web site is really a bunch of HTML-based Web pages linked together by clickable hyperlinks. In that regard, a Web site is really more like a CD-ROM multimedia title than a book or magazine. So start forgetting about Web "pages" in terms of the printed page. Think function: How will you design and link the pages to give folks the easiest and clearest access to the information you intend your site to serve up. Web site design is a big challenge: You're designing pages, and you're designing the way the pages link together. But folks won't go through the pages of your site in any particular order. Not only that, but keeping the page design consistent is a monster task because you want all pages to fit your color and graphic scheme—tough when they're spread all over. Plus, you need to see at a glance how all the pages are linked,
with a map view, preferably. Fortunately, NetObjects Fusion is tops in both these areas, an important combination. This visual and functional design work takes time, which is why you build your site off-line, on your local hard disk or network server. As different staff members provide the raw text and graphics content, you need time to get everything formatted and linked correctly. Does you final site design work? You've got to test it! If clicking a button for a hyperlink to another page produces a browser error message, you've got a link that doesn't match up. You've got to fix any broken links, and test again! With NetObjects Fusion, you never have to have broken links again, ever. With the kinks in links ironed out, it's time to load the HTML pages—and the linked graphics files—onto the actual Web server computer that puts your Web site on the Internet—your Web warehouse. You'll post your site right from your computer by dialing into your ISP's Web server using some special software. The software opens what's called an FTP (File Transfer Protocol, another Internet special service) session, which opens a data
pipe to the actual hard drive on the server. You simply copy your Web page files onto the server hard drive subdirectory reserved for you—your ISP provides you all the server and directory name detail you'll need. Note that Netscape Composer, NetObjects Fusion, and most other Web authoring programs include "Wizards" or other utilities that will gather up all of your site's Web files and automatically log on to the Web server and transfer your
files, making sure all the file links work on the server. If you need a separate FTP program, try FTP Explorer, a shareware program you can download at
So that's it. Now you know how the Web works (well, basically) and what a Web site is, what you need to know to get started. It's an exciting moment as you log onto your first Web site for the first time, knowing it's now available to folks around the world. So get started already!
Illustration: heiroglyphics from Robin Jareaus's Global Enterprise at www.artville.com |
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