What is a website?
A website is just a bunch of files in a directory (and usually some sub-folders too) that is located on a computer accessible on the internet.
These files might include:
- HTML Files – Each page is a html file.
- Images – Any image you want display on your site should be in the directory (or a sub-directory)
- CSS Files – These are the files that make you webpage look cool or pretty.
All websites MUST contain an index.html file. This is the first page that loads when someone types in your website.
HTML Tags
All HTML files contain <HTML tags>. These tags are used to tell the computer what a specific part of a html file does. Most HTML tags are split in to two parts –
Open – <tagname> Close – </tagname>
Getting Started
Every html page starts out like this:
<html>
This tag tells your browser that this file is a html file. Everything goes inside of this tag.
<head>
Inside This tag is where you put things like external style sheets and JavaScript.
<title>
This appears on the tab at the top of your web browser and is also displayed on search engines.
<body>
Everything that you want to appear on your page goes inside of this tag.
Headings
Headings have two purposes on web pages.
- Firstly they are used to make page titles and subtitles stand out from the rest of the text, helping users navigate and read your page.
- Secondly they are used by search engines to determine what the content of a web page is.
Paragraphs
When you create html files, pressing enter doesn’t add a new line – you need to use <p> tags to put things in to paragraphs.
Links
I’m a link that opens in a new tab
You can add links to a different page using the <a> tag.
You choose to open the link in a new tab by using the target = “_blank” attribute.
Images
You can add images to a web page!
Have a go at this Kahoot to see what you have learned this lesson!
Activity / Homework
Throughout this unit you will be building your own website, bit by bit. Your homework is to come up an idea for what your website is going to be about.
Think about…