How to learn to build a website

The first thing you should ask yourself is what kind of a website do you want to build, there are basically two types:

• A basic website simply provides information, displays pictures, audio or other files.
• A database driven website does the same thing as a basic website, however it also allows the user to login, save profiles, information and do searches among other things.

Once you have decided on the type of website you want to build, you are ready to start making a list of the things you will need.  For the simplest of websites, you will need nothing other than a computer and access to the internet and access to a web host, which in many cases can be had for free.

Basic Websites

If you choose to have a basic website, you can start in one of two methods:  You can use a piece of software to walk you through the authoring of your new website, or you can write the code directly yourself.  There are many free software programs available for download from the internet that will help you write the website yourself - one of the more advanced ones that I find myself using sometimes is called NVU.

Don't automatically assume that writing code will be a more difficult route, the generic language for writing a webpage is called HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language).  By itself, HTML is not difficult to learn, most common tasks can be performed with just a handful of tags (tags are descriptive commands that define how your data is supposed to render on the web page).  There are many free tutorials on the internet that will teach you the basics of the HTML language.  A knowledge of this language will be useful in debugging and customizing code you may have written with a program.  Do a search for "HTML Tutorial" to find one of these free guides.  Some of the most common tags you will learn are anchors, images, divs, spans, paragraphs, tables and breaks.

If you want to extend the functionality of your static website, you can incorporate Javascript into the website - this is a programming language that will run inside of the webpage - it will make your website more dynamic, interactive and add functionality.  Many free site building programs will also help you with some Javascript.

Database Driven Websites

Database driven websites use the same technologies as the basic websites, but they also incorporate at least one additional language to allow it to retrieve and store data and perform tasks on the server side of the internet.  They also incorporate a database, where the data for your website will be stored.

These languages are more robust than HTML and take more time to learn, however, there are still many free guides to them available on the internet which can be obtained by searching.  Some of the more popular languages are perl, php, and asp.  Perl and php are usually found on Linux or Unix servers, but are also common on Windows Machines.  ASP is a Microsoft language run on windows servers. 

Web Hosts

Free web hosts will generally allow you to run only basic websites, however you may come across some that will give you more features and access to other languages.  Paid hosting services are not very expensive, you may be able to find some for a few dollars a month that will provide access to several different languages, a database and some pre-installed appliations.

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