To begin with, Wikipedia answers the question thusly: A webpage or web page is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a computer screen.

This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other webpages via hypertext links.
Webpages may be retrieved from a local computer or from a remote web server. The web server may restrict access only to a private network, e.g. a corporate intranet, or it may publish pages on the World Wide Web. Webpages are requested and served from web servers using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Webpages may consist of files of static text stored within the web server's file system (static webpages), or the web server may construct the (X)HTML for each webpage when it is requested by a browser (dynamic webpages). Client-side scripting can make webpages more responsive to user input once in the client browser.

First of all, the mysterious web page isn’t really as mysterious as it may seem.  For starters, it most likely didn’t start out its life in a super-duper program known only to web developers.  In all likelihood, it began life in a simple word processor, this is especially true of blogging.  As a matter of fact, right now I am typing this—on a Mac of course—but in a nifty little word processing/database program designed especially for Macs, called Scrivener.  This program leaves MS Word in the dust for 95% of the writing and word processing I do (web page drafting too) and it cost me under $40.  Yes, that is about ten-times less than Word.  So, even if you aren’t ready to start constructing that future website anytime soon, but have content in your head you wouldn’t mind getting down, then by all means go ahead and start typing in your favorite word processor, because it’s a piece of cake to get that text into a web page later down the line.

This is all not to say there isn’t any fancy web designer/developer stuff going on at some point.  Once your draft or page is written and the construction of your website begins, a familiar acronym comes into play, HTML.  This stands for hypertext markup language, and to put it simply, just means the code that is used to “construct”and order your text, or words.  HTML helps to structure paragraphs, italics, headers, bold text, etc.  Something known as CSS comes to play a little later on as well, for the “presentation” aspects, but we will save that for another time.

Every page on a website can actually be opened in a word processor, and even though some proud designers/developers will boast they “wrote” their entire web page, or site, in a specially made program for building web pages, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s more about a choice here.  You can certainly “code” the website and write the text all at the same time.  However, for our purposes here it’s important to know you can simply type all your web pages in a word processor, save them, preferably each page or topic to a different file or folder, and then let the programmer come in and code all your words after the fact, at the time the web page/site is being built.  As a matter of fact, this is how it’s done more often than not.

So, when you hear someone say they build their website, or even “wrote” their web page in Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Front Page, or even that other ambiguous program they call (some have heard of it) Photoshop… no need to worry, it was just a comfort or connivence thing to that individual.  I have written/constructed websites in all the above—so no worries.

Now, to understand further, when you are actually viewing a web page on the internet, naturally you’re seeing text, fancy text-illustrations, graphics, and colors, etc.  Well, the words themselves amount to little more than that word processing document we’ve been talking about, and all the fancy type or fonts, and the colors come to you by way of the code that is hidden from view on the internet.  A nice trick to learn if you ever want to actually see that code (don’t let it scare you, as it might) is to just right click on your screen somewhere in a neutral area, and select “view source code” or “page source,” depending upon the browser you’re using, and you will then see an impressive array of code, characters and text (it might actually just look like hieroglyphics—or maybe even that you broke your computer, don’t worry, you didn’t).  Somewhere in the middle of it all you will actually find the text of your web page.  In most all cases, unless the website is incredibly crude, the code will outnumber the amount of text, by a significant degree.

To help further illustrate what a web page is, here is a brief and simple description of what your browser actually is, or does.  Of course, by “browser” we’re talking about Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome (Chrome is relatively new) or Safari.  What the browser has actually become over the years is a sophisticated program for “rendering” a website.  That is to say that it’s a program that interprets all that code (HTML in part) we have been talking about, whilst also integrating and at the same time separating the text and graphics you actually see on a web site.  One of the best things about web pages, and this is part of what made the World Wide Web phenomenon happen all over the globe, is that any computer can read HTML files.  You can create the web pages (HTML files) on your Mac, PC, Unix or any other system you have and love to use, and anyone else on any computer, anywhere (with internet) can see your pages.  The WWW eliminated the drudgery of having to construct separate files for every conceivable computer platform or operation system just so they can be read or interpreted.

So, how do you actually make a web page (after the text is typed up in a word processor), in case one is thinking about going to the next level, and actually creating a page, a message, or any other creative endeavor they want authored on a website instead of just a word processing file?  This brings us to something known as web authoring software.  Now then, as usual, this topic could easily spin-off into all the amazing things this web authoring program can do with code, code authoring and a host of other things we don’t really want burden you with at the moment.  What is important to understand at this level, is that when you were typing up your text in a word processor, you formatted your text to look (render) via your word processing program, or the printed page, a certain way.  You may remember I said earlier that when you want a paragraph to be a paragraph, or bold to be bold, a title a title, etc., I explained this was done with HTML code?  Well, the big difference between that trusty word processor, and this fancy web authoring software, and again this is on a simple level, is that when you highlight a line of text and click on the bold button, for example… you see the text go bold in your word processor.  In the web authoring software, you essentially do the same exact thing, but instead of the text just going bold, the program inserts the code into the document that the browser will later read and use to convert that text into bold, on the internet.  Therefore, insofar as the more rudimentary tasks are concerened, such as bolding text, separating paragraphs, etc., the web authoring software does for you, what ordinarily a programmer must write-out manually, and therefor know/understand or look-up to accomplish the required task.

This is certainly the next step for the beginner to take when it’s desired to learn or simply create a page that will render on a website with all the formatting you might see in a word processing document.  Of course, with colors, graphics and many other things, more code is needed, CSS as mentioned earlier, and slightly more complicated HTML, or XHTML and even Javascript.

Keep in mind, what the web authoring software does with this auto code generation—can all be done in a totally manual fashion, with a simple text-editor, e.g.: text-edit, notepad… if you know the exact code to write which precedes and/or follows the text you desire to present on the website.  That text document, along with the embedded code is simply loaded into a browser, and as we learned earlier, the browser reads the code, along with the text, and leaves you with the nice document, or presentation  you see on a typical web page.  Serious programmers, or developers, as opposed to web designers, actually prefer this manual coding method, in a text editor, as it affords one with the extensive coding knowledge required for this, the maximum amount of creativity.

For those of you that wish to take the plunge, and start trying the manual method of coding, to see how certain lines of code, the simple stuff of course, may look in a browser, here is a brief list of web authoring programs that do the job nicely… again, these are the programs that allow you to select text and click a desired effect via a word processor type icon, as well as putting the code in manually, if you want to try that.
Mozilla Composer/SeaMonkey, NVU, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage (going through an online transition currently)… which are just a few.  For a beginner I might suggest going with Mozilla first, as it’s free, hard to go wrong there—and this comes to you from the people that bring you Firefox, so it’s good stuff.

Okay, that’s about it for now; whether it’s tinkering with code, or just getting started writing the content for your present website, future website or blog, this should get you at least headed in the right direction.

Richard Seymour

www.jargra.com