17th May 2008

Index files and homepage creation

Welcome to the 4th part of our tutorial.

1 - Finding a host	2 - Programs	3 - Designing page layout
4 - Designing part 2	5 - Intro to HTML	6 - Intro to HTML Part 2
7 - Creating the page

First thing we need to do before we continue is to look at the basics of how websites work.

When you type a web address into your browser it looks for a page on that website with certain names and loads that page first, below are a few examples of what the browser looks for.

index.html

index.htm

index.php

index.asp

default.html

default.htm

default.php

default.asp

For the purpose of this tutorial we will only consider index.html as this is the most common.

So for our example our homepage is going to be named index.html.

The other pages in your site can be called whatever you want, as long as they are HTML files, ie they have the .html or .htm extension (there are other options but that is beyond the scope of this course).

In the example on the last page recall that we could split the page into 3 sections, the logo/title, the links and the content, so the page would look like this:

To accomplish this in HTML you can use tables and cells which will split the page into these sections and make it easier to manage, to create this page we are going to use 1 table with three different cells to split the page up.

Tables can make up very complex pages and a lot of sites (if not most) use tables in one way or another. The next part of the course will introduce you to HTML and how we can get the above result for our new page.

Click here to continue the tutorial.