Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Creating Your First Page

Every Web site is a collection of one or more Web pages. You jump from page to page by clicking various elements in your Web browser, like links, pictures, or buttons. It may not sound very high-tech, but putting an entire Web site together and polishing it up is a significant undertaking. However, the first step to Web mastery is just building a single Web page. That’s the task you’ll tackle in this chapter.

Web pages are the basic unit of Web design. The ideal Web page contains enough information to fill up a browser window, but not so much that the reader needs to scroll from morning until lunchtime to get to the end. In other words, the ideal Web page strikes a balance—it avoids the lonely feeling caused by too much white space, and the stress induced by an avalanche of information.

The best way to get a handle on what a Web page should hold is to look at your favorite Web sites. On a news site like www.nytimes.com, every news article is a separate page (and longer stories are subdivided into several pages). On an e-commerce shop like www.amazon.com, every product has its own page. Similarly, a personal Web site like www.MyUndyingLoveForPigTrotters.com may be divided into separate Web pages with titles like “About Me,” “Vacation Photos,” “Résumé,” and “Top Secret Recipes for Pig Parts.”

For now, don’t worry too much about how to divide up your Web site—it’s a task you’ll revisit in Chapter 8 when you start linking Web pages together. Instead, ...