Lesson 2. Preparing to Publish on the Web


When you write a book, a paper, an article, or even a memo, you usually don't just jump right in with the first sentence and then write it through to the end. The same goes with the visual artsyou don't normally start from the top-left corner of the canvas or page and work your way down to the bottom right.

A better way to write, draw, or design a work is to do some planning beforehandto know what you're going to do and what you're trying to accomplish, and to have a general idea or rough sketch of the structure of the piece before you jump in and work on it.

Just as with more traditional modes of communication, the process of writing and designing web pages takes some planning and thought before you start flinging text and graphics around and linking them wildly to each other. It's perhaps even more important to plan ahead with web pages because trying to apply the rules of traditional writing or design to online hypertext often results in documents that are either difficult to understand and navigate online or that simply don't take advantage of the features that hypertext provides. Poorly organized web pages also are difficult to revise or to expand.

In this Lesson

Today, I describe some of the things you should think about before you begin developing your web pages. Specifically, you need to do the following:

  • Learn the differences between a web server, a website, a web page, and a home page

  • Think about the sort of information (content) you want to put on the Web

  • Set the goals for the website

  • Organize your content into the main topics

  • Come up with a general structure for pages and topics

  • Use storyboarding to plan your website

After you have an overall idea of how you're going to construct your web pages, you're ready to actually start writing and designing those pages in Lesson 4, "Learning the Basics of HTML." If you're eager to get started, be patient! You'll have more than enough HTML to learn over the next three days.




Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and CSS in One Hour a Day
Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and CSS in One Hour a Day (5th Edition)
ISBN: 0672328860
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 305

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