Software

A web site is a collection of web pages on a particular topic.

A web page is a document written in HTML code.Web pages are linked together by hyperlinks, which can be pictures or text, that take you to another page.Most web sites load at a home page that can take you to other pages on the site.

Web authoring software can be used to produce sites that are very simple or very complex.

Types of sites include:

personal – a simple site about a person’s life or hobbies

corporate – a site to represent a business or organization

commercial – a complex site which sells goods online through secure servers. The site will be linked to databases which store and process the orders

training – some sites aren’t published on the web, but on a company Intranet, where employees can use them when they need to.

Users navigate around web sites by clicking on buttons and hyperlinks.

A site map helps to show how pages are linked.

Navigation buttons should be in the same place on every page to make it easier to use.

A good rule is that the user should never be more than two clicks away from the information they want.

Home Page

Sales Disks Contact

Shop Online Music Films E-mail Postal

Online DVD shop

To create a web site, you need software which enables you to save files in HTML format.

You can use an HTML editor and write the code yourself.

You can use word processors and desktop publishing packages which allow you to save files as HTML.

Or you can also use specialist web design packages.

Web authoring software is used to create the layout of the web page.

Lots of people use the web, and their browser display settings will control how the pages look.

Using tables and frames is a good way of controlling how the objects on the page appear, but not all browsers support these.

Media objects, such as the site logo, images, buttons, sounds, videos and animations, are usually created in other software and saved as individual files.

The software links these files to their position on the page and loads them up when they are needed.

The web page has links to the file names and loads them when the page is opened.

It’s important to decide where to store all the files. If you move a file, the software won’t know where to look for it.

It might seem that linking objects this way is difficult, but linking means each object only has to be stored once, even if appears on lots of pages.

This cuts down the size of the web site, which usually affects the cost of hosting it on the web.

If you need to change an object, you only have to do it once, and the new version will load on every page where it appears.

However, it does mean that you have to think about your file names and where you store them, as even simple sites are made up of lots of files.

Web authoring software lets you:

Set up forms that the user can fill in online and send.

templates – standard layouts made up of colours and fonts that work well on the web

Some features of web authoring software include:

Use these facilities carefully or your web site will look the same as lots of others!

a selection of clip art, special effects and features, such as hit counters which count how many visitors the site has had.

web site preview so that you can see how your pages will look on the web and test that the links work properly

FTP facilities for uploading your site to the web.

test facilities – to see how your web site displays on different browsers, and how long each page will take to download

Keep graphic file sizes low or link them to a thumbnail so that people can open them if they want to.

Keep colour schemes consistent and fonts easy to read. Use common fonts or your pages may not display correctly.

Web sites are made up of web pages.

Web pages are written in HTML code.

Some web authoring software writes the code for you.

Graphic files are linked to each web page so they only need to be stored once.

You need to plan how the user will navigate between the pages.

People will view the web site with different display settings and browsers, so you need to test that it works for most of them.