The Website Itself

The Website

Pages & Programs.

Simple websites generally are made up of two main elements: pages and images. The pages themselves are all text (really!), such as the text you see on this page, interspersed with web page coding that causes browsers to display them as, well, a web page. You don't even need expensive programs to write it — any old text editor, like NotePad, can suffice. But, of course, you must know HTML to do this.

You basically have two options:

• Get a graphically-oriented program which writes the HTML for you. These will generally work well for you at the beginning, but later on you will probably find that you need to learn HTML. 
• Use a simple text editor such as NotePad, which comes standard with the Windows operating system, and learn HTML. While this sounds a bit more difficult, you can spend the time you'd take learning how to use your graphically-oriented program actually learning HTML — and it's not that hard to learn! 

This will save you a lot of confusion.

 Images & Image Programs.

Few websites can go without images. At the very least, you'll need a decent logo, and perhaps some pictures to enhance your presentation. Images can really make a website. You will likely find that you need to enhance the images or, at the very least, prepare them for use on the Web. There are a number of image editing programs running from Adobe Photoshop (the expensive industry standard) and Macromedia Fireworks to Adobe's Photoshop Elements, which will allow you add various "effects" (such as shadows) to your images as you prepare them for display on the Web.