Build Your First Web Site Today: EASYNOW Webs Series of Web Site Design, #1

Introduction

Firstly I would like to thank N. J. Notjohn for his very helpful book Notjohn's Guide to Kindle Publishing: Ten Steps To Formatting Your E-Book for Amazon (Or Any Other Retailer) which made writing and publishing this book so much easier. I wrote the book using Sigil Ebook Creator download here.

Why another book on Basic Web Site Design?

Learn How To Build Your Fist Web Site Today in easy to follow step by step processes.

This book presents the subject in an easy to follow step by step process, building on the previous steps as you go using an example project to work with so you can practice what you have learned in each section.

I have kept it simple and fun but with enough information so you can understand what is going on. This way you will have enough  basic knowledge to go on to build your own web sites.

You will learn to build your own custom web site that would cost you about $500 to a $1000 to have someone else build it for you. When you have finished your first web site you can go on building more web sites with what you have learned in this book. I know there are plenty of free web site building sites on the Internet, but as is the case in most circumstances you get what you pay for. They don't give you the freedom to do what you want to do and they have their advertising on your site.

You can say I Did It My Way!

With this process the simple steps show you how easy it really is to build your own web site.

You will learn how to build Simple Neat and Effective Web Sites.

You will learn how to set up a basic template system to reuse to easily build web sites with a lot less effort.

You don't need to have any previous knowledge of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) or CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets). I will explain what these as we progress with our project and how we will use them to create your web site, as they are the basis for all web sites no matter how small or large.

You will need to know how to use a computer, how to install programs, how to create a new file and other basics like these, but I will be keeping it simple to understand all the way through.

That’s why I am calling these series of helping hand books My EASYNOW Webs Series.

In 2008 I wrote a small booklet on Goal Setting called Goals from the Soul for a project I was working on and used the EASYNOW acronym as the basis of my goal setting, I decided to carry the theme through to developing a series of helping hand books on Web Design Techniques.

If you would like a copy of Goals from the Soul you can download it free from HERE

All the code used in this book can be downloaded so you can check you work against the examples I give in the book. There is a link at the end of the book.

As we work through this project you will learn good working practices and how you can turn this project into a basic set of template files you can reuse on your next project and more!

So let's get started!

Chapter 1 Getting Started

The Basics

For our project you will need some basic programs installed on your computer.

I will go through building this project using Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux 15.04, in essence it will mostly be the same for both platforms, I will cover any differences where relevant in each step.

Firstly you need a program to write your code with, a text editor or similar program such as notepad will do the job.

I suggest using something a little more dedicated to coding such as a code editor, this maybe a little harder to use at first but will make your job a lot easier later. A code editor such as the free editor Brackets which I find very good and can be downloaded from ;http://brackets.io/ and click on the link Download Brackets without Extract for Window. This will make your task much easier as it is intuitive in that it gives you code hints and auto completes your coding. Another one, Notepad++ can be downloaded from Download Notepad++, it is also easy to use and has a great search and replace function.

When you have downloaded the file for Brackets or Notepad++, if that is what you decide to use, just double click on the file name to install it using the default settings.

I suggest using BlueFish Editor on Linux. I have found this very easy to use also. To install it just use the Ubuntu software center.

Next you will need a web browser to view your web site, on Windows the default browser installed is Internet Explorer, but I would advise on using another browser. I use Mozilla Firefox as my main browser, and also have Google Chrome installed which has some very handy debugging features.

On Ubuntu you will have Firefox installed as the default browser.

To upload your web site files to your Hosting Server you will need an FTP (FileTransferProtocol) program. I use FileZilla. You can use it on both Windows and Linux. The Windows version can be downloaded from https://filezilla-project.org/ I downloaded the FileZilla_3.14.1_win64-setup.exe file. After the file has downloaded, double click on it to install it. You can download the Linux version from there also, but