Mellany's Webcreation Page 1
Dear Alyssa and all
My name is Melany and I would love to have a website like this but have a problem........I know nothing about computers and programming, actually I know even less than that. My husband gave me a computer, showed me how to switch it on and BAM!!! he thinks, job done.
You have to help me, all my friends talk about html and jpeg, blah, blah, blah and I sit there with a blank look on my face, you see I'm a computer virgin and I need help and lots and lots and lots of patience because I'm going to ask stupid questions like this one, Alyssa what on earth is HTML???????
I have heard it being used but am clueless as to what it means.Please help!!!
My husband would be so grateful.
Love and light
Melany
Hi Melany, Ok everyone else, I have said privately to Melany that I will teach her from wo to go how to build her own website if she will help me by teaching me how to teach. We are going to teach by a series of questions how to do this. When the information builds up too much I will transfer it to the website creation section of this website and it will basically have all the instructions for building your own website, so hey publishers who are lurking out there get ready for a really good online book here, lol.
Ok Melany untill two months ago, I also did not have a clue what HTML was. I vaugley knew it was a programming language and that you were supposed to save files in that format if you wanted to build anything on the web. I actively avoided it. Then I started to want to learn how to build my own dot com with very little money. Well in a very short space of time I learned that you could not build a website without using HTML which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, hey just another fancy name for a computer language, no biggie.
Ok first port of call is your local library, anything that says HTML but bear in mind alot of the books in the library are old and ancient in computer terms as the technology changes so quick. So use the library books to get the general idea then source good books basically printed in 2005 to use or you will end up reinventing the wheel not a good idea.
HTML is used to tell a browser (the thing you do all your internet stuff on, I personally have Microsoft Internet Explorer, whatever you have it would pay to go to their site and download the latest version also) how to interpret what you tell it in text. Ok I am now going to wait till you have more indepth questions after you have done a bit of research Melany. Search online also for the latest info. Now i could give you a list two pages long on internet resources but plenty of other sites do that and get paid for it, so for now I will tell you to go to a search engine and put in computer dictionary, that will at least explain the terms you are looking for.
love from Alyssa till the next question.
Thanks Alyssa.I tried the search engines and found a lot of information.I started writing all the information down then thought "there has to be an easier way".Can I save the Internet page and put it into a folder.How do I do that???
Love and light
Melany
Go to Favorites
it has two options up the top Melany.
Add to favorites
Organise favorites
click on organise favorites, you now have four options
Create Folder
Rename
Move to folder
Delete
First job is to create folders for logical groups. I have computer books, programming, shopping reciepts, personal, spiritual sites, anyway you get the picture.
When you have created these you then use move to folder. Click on the fav you want to move and then which folder you want it in.
Now next time you hit an interesting site you hit add to favorites.
A box that says name comes up if the name means nothing to you rename it to something you will know, then click on the folder you want it in and ok you are done.
You now have the links to lots of favorites without having to download all that space hungry information.
When you back up your important files always back up your favorites as this is a valuable resource.
love alyssa till next question.
Ok Melany say you want to pick up what I have just said here and save it on your computer.
Go to the program you use to view and organise the file directory structure on your computer (get hubbys help here if you have to). Ok now locate the option on the side which says create a folder. You have probably got something like Melany's documents this is a good place to create this folder in.
Sometimes the options on the side are not expanded, there are little arrows if the option you want is not there try hitting these arrows.
Ok you are in Melanys document folder lets say so hit create a folder call it something like melswebsite all one word helps for both folders and files cos when we come to transfer them to your server and need to specify a path it makes life an awful lot easier.
Now double click on this melswebsite folder once inside now create a folder called art. Stay where you are and now create a folder called info. Info is where you are going to create a text file to store any information you like.
Now go to your start icon and hit programs, then accessories, then notepad. This is the program you are going to write your website on.
Ok this has now opened up a new file go to file save as.
Call this file something like alysinfo.txt and leave the txt files data format thats what you want for this one.
Now come back to the info you want from here, highlight it and hit the right button on your mouse and hit copy. Go back to the file you have created and hit paste this will transfer the information from your internal clipboard to the file. It will probably say cant save pictures or something you dont care you just want the text anyway just hit save and you now have this info anytime you want it. When you want to review this file just double click on it. You will be doing this soon in your sleep, lol, although we did cut cords so you can sleep tonight so hopefully it is all in your dreams.
Ok this process is what we are going to use to create your website files. The only difference is we are going to be saving them with an all files format and the file extension .html
Ok enough for tonight my friend you need to sleep. Catch you for the next thrilling installment tomorrow.
love alyssa.
Melany you have been so busy, mind you I knew you would be. Ok sounds like a good idea to put your folder on the desktop. Mine is is always cluttered up with about five windows open on top of it so I tend not to drag and drop anything anywhere as everything is a bit cluttered, but basically Melany work out what works for you.
Now the mysterious CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. Now bear in mind people I am not a computer language teacher I am a beginner myself, however we often teach best what we most need to learn so working on that philosophy here I go. HTML is a wonderful language and a great tool however it does have its limiations and in the field of formatting or making your page look pretty it is limited and verbose(long winded). CSS was developed to address this. You only have to have one CSS file for says tens of web pages. On my site the purple pages with the menu bars up the top all have one CSS file that they call on to format them, except that is for calender page, as you will notice calender page has a table in it so another CSS file had to be written for that page. Twins has its ok CSS file and Twins page 2 has another CSS page. If you take a look at Twins page 2 you will notice lots of mother and twins drawings on the background and two link boxes down the side this is completely different to the twins page, although the menu systems are the same. Webcreation page and now Melswebsite page both share the same CSS file. AS far as CSS styles go I would lump twins and website creation into the same category and the others into another style. I wanted to do this to demonstrate different styles. I personally love my bar menu across the top, but I will let you into a little secret now, I don't think it is bona fide programming I have actually defined one of my headings h3 as being in a pink box with a border for my menu system. However that is jumping ahead of ourselves a bit.
CSS can save you so much HTML code and it means as well as giving you a really powerful formatting tool it allows you to write compact programs. Which when you decide to change the colour of the background you can do with one stroke of the keyboard on the CSS file instead of tens of webpages.
Look I learned all my CSS from the wonderful books from sitepoint. I will put the link on my web pages.
The best way I find to learn is by actually seeing what something does. I am going to send you the html file for your website page, and the css file to go with it. What I want you to do Melany is to put it in the info folder you created when you save it to your computer. Now there are two ways to open these files You can double click on the html file and it will open up and display according to the html inside it. you can then right click on this open page which is all internal and it will give you a box of options and one of them is view source. If you hit this you will get the same file given to you in notepad form. There is however a different way of opening it straight into notepad and you will need to do this for the css file cos you dont want window frontpage touching it and that is what will get hold of it if you double click css. Ok what you do to open straight into notepad is to right click once on the file and you will get given some options you are going to open with and then one of the drop down options is notepad click on that and your file is ready to edit or view. For online viewers click here to see what melany is viewing, ie the html file without the influence of the css file EXAMPLE.
Now to see what CSS really does I want you after opening the html file with the css file in the same folder, to move the css file so the html file does not know it is there. You will see that without the css file the page is black and white and probably the text for the menu is all on top of the text in the main body, anyway it will be a real mess. You tell us what happens. This shows you in a practical way that css is there to tell the page how to display in all ways.
Love from alyssa till next question.