Learning to write a web page

When you have made a website, you will want to share it. Not just with the people you know (who you can tell about your website in person, or in an email, and give the whereabouts of it), but also with people you don't know, who may just happen to be looking on the Internet for what you have to say. You will want to be found through search engines, ideally, or at least have lots of links to your website from other people's.

First you will have to make your website available to the world, by putting it on a computer which is permanently connected to the outside world. Usually, this involves an Internet Service Provider, because they often provide their users with a certain amount of Web space for free. There are other (free) web space providers on the Internet, too.

Search engines

There are two distinctive types of search engines:

• those which have to be specifically told about your website (you have to 'register' with them). Yahoo (and probably Yahooligans) is such a search engine.
• those which have so-called web crawlers or spiders running, which are computer programs which crawl around the World Wide Web and put you in their list as and when they find you. For this, there will have to be a little bit of traffic to your site, but you can even do this yourself. Just surf to your own website occasionally, and maybe get some of your friends to do that, too.

Search engines commonly work with 'keywords'. Your website will be searched for the occurrence of the search key in your text, but you can also provide your own keywords in so-called meta tags, which are placed in the header of your web pages. These keywords do not have to be the same as words in the rest of your text, but may describe the general idea of your site. 'television script', for instance, may be a good keyword to use if that is what your website contains, whereas the pages themselves might not have that exact phrase in them anywhere. Somebody on the hunt for television scripts on the Internet, would then find yours, even though your text is not visibly announced as a television script. Some examples:

<meta name="description" content="Web writing course for children of around 10">
<meta name="author" content="Maria Turkenburg  mailto:mgwt@ysbl.york.ac.uk">
<meta name="keywords" content="web writing, web writing course,
web writing course for children, web writing course for children age 10,
HTML for children, HTML for children age 10">
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2001-2005 TurkenburkiePower!!!">
<meta content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">

Robots

If you have one or more pages in your website which you do not want to be found on search engines (sets of photographs you only want to show to your aunt and uncle in Australia, for example, but not to the whole world), you can install a robot on your site, which will allow entrance to your 'open' pages, but not to your more private ones. Note that not all Internet service providers (and thus not all Webspace providers) allow the use of robots!

Copyright

Difficult! There is a whole set of very official laws on copyright. This means you should not pass off any pictures or text on your website as your own, if you have not created them yourself. It also means, however, that if you have created something special, you can put copyright on it by simply putting the copyright sign (©) on your page, with your name (or the name of your company) and a year (a period is also acceptable, so you can add to it every year, rather than replace the whole copyright thing once January comes). For an example, look at the bottom of this page.

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What do we need? HTML and the .html file Tags Formatting Head and body
Size and shape Colour Colour table Colour wheels Pictures
Special characters Special characters table Hyperlinks Combining and nesting tags Lists
Tables Frames Style sheets Maps Forms Scripts Publicising (meta tags) Bits and pieces