CSC
112 - Lesson 1
In order to produce and maintain a web site, you need to be aware
of the role and purpose of all the links in the chain that make
it possible to publish and view your web site.
Not only do you need a computer to access the Internet but also
the proper software (browser). Yet this is still not enough. You
must subscribe to some type of service to receive the data. Most
users use a dial up connection over the phone line but many are
also using DSL and cable modems. Access can also be made through
a network.
Commonly, users access the Internet through a service provider
like AOL or CompuServe, or they use the services of an IP like
earthlink.com, shout.net, or advance.net.
In order to publish web pages to your web site, you usually create
the html code on your local computer, then upload the content
to a server via FTP. In this class, we will primarily be using
the built-in FTP feature of Dreamweaver to upload and update our
pages.
A web site is comprised of a related group of web pages that
is usually loaded on one server and one domain.
By using tools like Dreamweaver, we can make managing a web site
much easier. Tools like "global replace" help us to
save time by automating tasks that would normally be time consuming.
It can also be used to edit CSS information for formatting the
style of an entire site or just one page. We also moved pages
and graphics by dragging and dropping them into new folders. Dreamweaver
updated all of the links for us.
We use hyperlinks not only to connect to other web pages on and
off of our web sites, but they are also used to locate information
from within the same page through the use of anchor tags. Hyperlinks
can also be used to trigger JavaScript behaviors within a page.
Anchor tags can be used to index information on a web site. Typically
at the top of the page there is a "table of contents"
or "index" that uses anchor links directly to go to
more detailed information or definition further down the page.
Even though anchor tags are commonly used on a single web page,
they also can be used to directly access sections of other web
pages that are hyperlinked to the page.
The index concept we discussed above is not to be confused with
the concept of the index.html or index.htm page. The index.html
page is always the default page in any directory. In other words,
when you type in http://robhiggins.com, you are really accessing
http://robhiggins.com/index.html.
This is the same in any directory. When you type in http://robhiggins.com/parkland,
you are actually seeing http://robhiggins.com/parkland/index.html.
The index.html page is the page that the browser goes to by "default"
if another is not specified. The index.html page is case sensitive
so don't use any capital letters or change the spelling in any
way. (Example: index3.html)
For security reasons, you should always add an index.html page
to each of your directories so users can not see the default index
of files that are in that directory. If the directory is used
for images or other files that do not contain any html pages,
you might consider installing an index.html with a "push
metatag" that will direct the user to the main index.html
page.
The code is:
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Index</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="1; URL=http://robhiggins.com/
">
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#0080FF" TEXT="#000000">
</BODY></HTML>
This code will send the user to the url: http://robhiggins.com/
after one second.
