Web Your Name® HTML Code, Website Code, CSS.

Contact Us - Site Map - Home

Understanding HTML is a
must to be successful online.

I started out in the website design business by accident. In fact, our home improvement company website was initially designed by an old friend of mine. We both had computer backgrounds, but I have always been intimidated by new technology at times. Believe it or not, I have never held, owned, or used an iPod. When we finally got a DVR (Digital Video Recorder), I made my wife man the controls for a good six months. I suppose it is pretty ironic that a 31 year old with a nearly 2 decades of information technology experience could be intimidated by gadgets and software. Website design was a whole new world to me and my focus was building the struggling home improvement company, so I honestly just did not have the time.

I knew enough about websites and the Internet to know that HTML stood for HyperText Markup Language, but that was about it. I was not a coder and I did not speak or understand code. The only language I spoke at the time was English. After about a year or two of designing, maintaining, managing, and updating my website, my friend called it quits. It was time to find a new "webmaster".

I decided that since my business was small, I needed to step up and learn how to update, create, and manage a website without anyone else's help. So I started reading about websites and decided that Dreamweaver would be the best program to us. Microsoft Frontpage was considered, but seemed a bit too complex for me since I was just starting. I obtained a copy of Dreamweaver and was off to the races. I began exploring the world of HTML.

Most computer programmers who deal with languages such as Jscript, PEARL, or ColdFusion look down upon HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as code or languages. I guess they feel that because their language is so much more complex, HTML and CSS are not nearly as important. It would be like learning English compared to learning Mandarin Chinese (one of the most difficult for children to master and for foreigners to learn). HTML and CSS are programming languages and they are code. If you don't speak HTML and CSS fluently, you are going to have a difficult time mastering the art of website design. Writing valid HTML and CSS is critical to your website being displayed properly in a Internet web browser. The W3C's easy-to-use HTML validation service, based on an SGML parser, can check your code for errors. W3C also provides a CSS vaidation service as well. Both services are FREE. W3C validation has absolutely no effect on your Google rankings.

So here I was an Internet code writing virgin. Where to begin was probably the first question. In order to create an Internet website, you need to have several things in place before you can begin coding or programming. You need to register a domain name, through a registrar such as GoDaddy, which will cost you about $7-$15 for a year. The other more costly thing you need to have is a hosting company. A hosting company is the company that stores the data. The hosting company is the place where all of the website information and files are stored. This can cost anywhere from about $120 to $500 a year depending on your needs. I use HostNine, because of their superior quality customer support team. Because I manage so many websites I cannot afford for a hosting company to wait hours to respond to my support tickets. HostNine's response time to support tickets is usually instantaneous.

Once you have your domain name registered and your hosting in place, you need to change your DNS settings. DNS stands for Domain Name Service. Your DNS settings are what tells the Internet where to find your website at. This setting is located at your registrar. When I register a domain name through GoDaddy, I need to provide GoDaddy with HostNine's DNS information. Once I have completed all of this, I am just about ready to begin.

The simplest way to create a website is to use a template. There are many Internet web sites that offer FREE website templates. Once you have downloaded a template, you need to upload the template to your server into your public_html folder. This is called the root folder. The easiest way to accomplish this task is by using a FTP client. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FreeZilla is a free FTP program that you can download to use. Once you have uploaded your template you are ready to customize it to your needs. Now you are finally ready to Dreamweaver your way to success.

When you have setup your site in Dreamweaver, you need to open your index.html file. (However, this file could be called index.htm, default.htm, or default.html.) This is your "homepage". Dreamweaver provides you with three different views of this file. The Design view is the graphical interface and allows you to modify the HTML through buttons and tables and drag and drop commands. The Code view allows you to edit the HTML code directly, this is for advanced webmasters, but is critical to perfecting your website. When the W3C validator finds errors, you need to go into the HTML code to find them and correct them. Don't assume that because you are using a website template, that the HTML code is formatted correctly. In fact, just about every website template I have used before has had multiple errors in the code. You should check and correct these errors before you embark on designing future pages.

Throughout creating, designing, and maintaining more than 100 websites in the last two years, I have become an HTML and CSS expert. I agree with the "complex programmers" that HTML and CSS is quite simple and easy, but only after you have had quite a bit of experience using them. I have had to request help several times in forums to help me solve some of the problems that I have come across in my work. Even as an HTML and CSS expert with an advanced skill set, there is still plenty of stuff that I do not know. Part of the learning curve is trial and error, the other part is reaching out for help from those around you that know more than you do.

In the end, there is no substitute for experience. I became a webmaster expert only after thousands of hours of teaching myself how to do tasks that I wanted to accomplish. Now I use my skill set to help other people. It is far more efficient for someone to pay me a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars to do something that they have very little knowledge about. You see, once you have finally accomplished the goal of designing your website, you have not even started the task of optimizing your website. Optimizing a website is what makes a website successful on Google and the Internet.

Did you also know that your website needs a robots.txt file? Most website templates do not include this file. You can view Google's robots.txt file.