Developing An Internet Presence Part 5

Developing An Internet Presence Part 1
Developing An Internet Presence Part 2
Developing An Internet Presence Part 3
Developing An Internet Presence Part 4
Developing An Internet Presence Part 5
Developing An Internet Presence Part 6
Developing An Internet Presence Part 7

Were going to start this nice and easy just so you know exactly how all the mechanics of an Internet presence works and what you need to do just to get a simple page presented.

As we mentioned in an earlier article, your Domain Name is simply a post box to where you have the space you have chosen to occupy on the Internet. We have already explained how to point your Domain Name to this space, along with the means to get it there, what we need now is to add some content.

How Does This Work?

If you are a novice then the secret here is to walk before you run and there are a few basics you need to know. Before we go into fancy stuff like databases and content management systems we need to make sure our Web Space is working and there are some basics we can do to prove that.

If you have already searched the internet you will probably have noticed the area at the top of your chosen browser, where you type in a website address you wish to get to, often carries additional information once you have reached the website.

There can be a combination of reasons for this from a redirect being added to a file extension.

What’s A File Extension?

A file extension is the bit you see at the end of the domain name and here are a few examples:

http://www.mobiledjonline.org.uk/index.php
http://www.pubquizhelp.com/index.html

You will notice the words immediately following the domain name are /index and the bits on the end vary. One is .php and one is .html although .htm would work equally as well. There are more but were going to keep it simple for now.

The important bit is the word index because this word tells browsers where to start; the extension on the end is primarily governed by the complexity of your site, some are standard websites where you simply view pages, and others are interactive driven by databases.

Time For An Experiment

Check out the code below. Don’t be concerned it has lots of stuff in it as this is purely an experiment to test your space:

Testing My Page



This is my test page.

How Do I Make This Work?

I hate to keep using this word but if you are a “Novice” then it’s probably best you use a recognised editor if you propose to write your own website. If this is your chosen path then Dreamweaver is probably about as good as it gets although there are free ones out there which can be found with a little searching, most of the top end products come with free trials which would suit this experiment.

I am not an advocate of “Windows” and inherently using “Windows” products to create a website will add a large chunk of inane rubbish to your coding and certainly cause you crawling issues (we will cover this later).

What Do I Do Next?

Choose an editor, create a file called index, there will be an option in your editor to “save as” your file extension but at this stage I would use .html which would suit this exercise.

Within this article we have given you some code, which starts . There is lots of stuff in between but the truth is what will actually be displayed is:

“This is my test page.”

Seems a little disappointing I know but the bits either side of this phrase are fundamental to making the page work and what you are currently interested in are the bits between where the phrase sits.

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

If you then upload the file using your FTP client and the type in your website address in a browser hopefully you should see the phrase occupying your web space.

As index.html is the starting file that the browser will pick up on how you name additional pages that link from that initial page is irrelevant but make sure there are no spaces in the names.