Building a website can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it.... it really depends on what you want to display, how you want the website to function, and what tools you are going to use to put it all together.
If you really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of web design, and building websites from scratch, then you will have to learn HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML is a programming language that Internet Browsers (i.e. Microsoft Internet Explorer) know how to interpret. HTML files are simply text files that are given a file extension like .html, .htm, or .php (there are many other extensions that browsers can interpret), but the main ones for web pages are .htm and .html.
If you create a text document in a text editor (like NotePad.exe.... free with Microsoft Windows), and call it
anything.html, then an Internet Browser will be able to open it, and you'll see a web page.
For most people just starting out, the best and quickest way to build a website is to use a 3rd party software program. Probably the most popular website building program today is
Microsoft FrontPage. It is not free (something like $160 US), but makes building a website almost as easy as typing a Microsoft Word document. Another popular program is
Macromedia
Dreamweaver.
If you don't want to spend much money on a web design program, then check out software download sites like
Download.com. There are hundreds of tools available to help make building your website as effortless as possible. In fact,
click here for a current list of web design software (or HTML editors) available for download at
Download.com.
Once you've got your website designed, you'll want to publish it (or upload it) to the internet.
Click here to learn how to upload your website to the
internet.
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