Learning Resources
Lesson
Web Pages
Web pages are the basic building blocks of the world wide web. A web page contains three kinds of information
- textual information that you can read in the browser
- links to images and other kinds of information that are loaded by the browser when the page is opened
- instructions (html codes) to the browser about how to display the information on your computer screen
Web Sites
Web sites are collections of related web pages. Usually they are all linked with some form of navigation system. This course, for example is a web site with a large number of related pages, and a navigation structure for finding your way around and for showing where you are at all times. A web site can be small with only a few pages, or it can be very large with thousands of pages. A web site is usually denoted by a domain name such as cdli.ca, or virtualteachercentr.ca, or leevalleytools.ca. There are many kinds of websites from personal, to educational, to commercial.
Web Servers
A web server is a computer that is running web server software. It can host many websites, each with their own URL. The web server may have its own URL, and be hosting a number of web sites, each with their own URL. The STEM~Net website, for example is at www.stemnet.nf.ca. The computer is a large Sun server running Solaris Unix as the operating system. It lives in the Computing and Communications center at MUN. The web server software is Apache web server. The computer also hosts the SchoolNet News website at http://www.snn-rdr.ca/. This type of website is called a virtual website because it is not associated with the physical machine that hosts it.
Webs
A web is essentially a website that does not have a domain name. Rather, the url is an extension of an existing domain name. While the term can apply to any such website, it particularly applies to such sites created in Microsoft FrontPage. When used with Internet Information Server software, this FrontPage feature allows the creation of many such webs without any of the problems associated with creating virtual websites.
Each web is unique, complete with its own navigation structure and content, operating independently of the main website. This feature allows web owners to have management rights for their own web without having any management rights to the main website. This feature will be used in this course to build and manage your own content as part of the course activities.
Web Content Development
Web content development can be accomplished with many different pieces of software. The html coding and the text content can be written with very simple text editing tools such as Notepad. Doing so is a very useful exercise since it helps you understand and learn how pages are constructed. On the other hand, if ypu are primarily interested in creating content, and the coding is important, but not your main interest, there are a wide variety of tools available. They range from HTML editors that are plain text but let you insert code by clicking on buttons all the way up to full WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors that automatically insert the code and format the page content as you write it. Check a site like TUCOWS on STEM~Net to see the range of HTML editors.
This course uses Microsoft FrontPage as the content development tool for students because of its simplicity (it looks and acts a lot like Word), power (it has full site and page management tools, theme and navigation tools, and many others), and it lets you focus on the project you are working on.
Activity
Assigned activities
Complete the Unit Project.
Test Yourself
There is no self test for this lesson.