An Overview of the Process

There can be a lot of things involved in creating a webpage, but in it's simplest incarnation there are really three steps:

1. Find somewhere to "host" your page

  • What this means is that you need to find space on a webserver somewhere where you can keep all of your pictures and web pages so that they will be accesible to anyone on the world wide web.
  • If you are a Purdue student, then you already have this set up for you by ITaP. You will need to set this up using the ITaP instructions here. Just put your pages in the "www" directory created on mace.itap.purdue.edu. This will be discussed in the first lab along with best way to edit/create your page apart from the section 'Create your pages' shown below.
  • If you are student at another university than you probably have a similar set up. The same might hold true for your workplace as well.
  • If none of the above apply to you, then you might want to consider one of the numerous free web hosting services available. I personally recommend getting a Yahoo/Geocities account. Sure there's an annoying banner ad, but you get what you pay for.
  • If you own a Unix based machine (say Linux or Mac OSX), and have a static IP address then you can probably host a page on your own computer, but that's the subject of another guide.

2. Create your pages

  • At some point you are going to actually have to create the pages that you want to host, by both adding content to them, and then adding HTML code to present them in an appealing way. There are several ways to accomplish this.
  • One of the easiest ways is to simply create a document in a product like Microsoft Word, which will then save it directly to HTML format for you. Then you just upload the HTML and images to the directory, and you should be fine. I've played around with this a bit, and frankly it's not the best way to do things. It tends to screw up if you use complicated formatting, and the code it generates is so messed up that if you ever want to change things after the fact you are out of luck. It might however be the path of least resistance, and the good news is that it now allows creation of either PNG or GIF images.
  • Another option is to use a Web Page editor. Adobe PageMill, Claris HomePage, Macromedia DreamWeaver, I think will all do the job for you. There are also many shareware options available for various platforms, I recommend Download.com or Versiontracker.com as good places to look. These are what are referred to as WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get), and allow you to create a webpage without looking at any of the actual HTML code. I've never used any of these, so I really can't recommend any, but they are a very popular way to work. The worst thing is that many of the commercial programs can be quite expensive, especially for the casual home user. If you are affiliated with an educational institution I would definitely check their site-licenses, or at least take advantage of an educational discount.
  • The third option, and my personal favorite, is to simply write the HTML code by hand. This might sound tricky, but is actually quite simple. You really only need to know a couple of commands, and the work can be done in any text editor. Much of the rest of this guide will provide you with details about how to do things this way. Even if you don't intend on writing a lot of the HTML code by hand, it's still not a bad idea to learn something about the inner workings of a web page.

3. Upload your pages

  • Now the only thing left is to actually put what you've created on the server. This is most easily done by an FTP program, like Fetch for the Macintosh. Again, if you don't already have an ftp program you can probably find one at the sites listed above.
  • If you write all of your HTML directly on the server, then you can avoid this step but it also usually requires that you code your HTML by hand.
  • If you are hosting the site on your local machine, then you can probably avoid this step. However you still might want to edit pages in a draft directory, in which case you'll need to move them to the appropriate live directory, usually by creating a folder in the "www" directory.