Web Basics

"That's a great story," said Claude after I had finished, "but you got lucky. It doesn't help me make money."

"On the contrary," I replied. "Luck played a part, but so did know-how. By fine-tuning and updating the page and directing traffic to the site, I probably doubled my profit."

Claude was still unconvinced. "Sure, but doing all that techie stuff is easy for you. Even if I wrote something good, I still couldn't make a Web page out of it. I'm not a geek, so there's no way that I could build a Web site."

"That, my friend, is where you're wrong," I said. It was time to correct his misconceptions about some basic Web terminology.

Web Pages Are Documents

HTML for Newbies

Learn the basics of hypertext markup language using the tutorials listed at www.memwg.com/html-tutorials/.

A Web page is just a document. You can even use a word processor to create it, like any other document. You don't believe me? Launch your word processor and look through its menus. Look for a menu or option like "Save as Web page" or "Export as HTML." (HTML, short for hypertext markup language, is the standard Web page document format.) You're already capable of creating Web pages and you probably didn't know it!

Web Authoring for Free

Find a list of quality Web page authoring freeware at www.memwg.com/html-freeware/.

A Web page is a very simple document. That's one of its strengths. In fact, a word processor is usually too complicated a tool to use for creating and editing Web pages. A specialized Web page editor is a much better tool for this purpose, and there are many free ones to choose from (Figure 1.5). With a bit of experience, you can even tweak the documents by handwhich sometimes is useful.

Figure 1.5. Nvu, available at www.nvu.com, is one of many free Web page editors.

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From Web Page to Web Site

Once you have a Web page, you can build a Web site. Let me repeat this point, because I want to emphasize it: If you can build a Web page, you can build a Web site. A Web site is just a set of pages that share a common Web address. In other words, the Web site is where the Web page "lives," so to speak, on the Internet.

Although single-page Web sites definitely exist, most sites have multiple pages, often hundreds or thousands of them. But such sites are built one page at a time, so don't feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of you. If you can find time to create one or two pages a week, you'll have 50 to 100 pages on your site in a matter of months. Not that you have to wait that longyou can start making money with your site with just a few pages.

No Programming Required The kind of Web site you're going to build doesn't require any programming. In technical terms, it's called a static site because the Web pages hardly ever change. By contrast, a dynamic site has pages that change, either because the content is updated from a database or because the content is generated by small computer programs that vary the material depending on the viewer. Sites like www.amazon.com make extensive use of dynamic page generation.

The Web Server Makes It Public

The Web server is a software application that exposes a Web site for others to see. You can't have a Web site without a Web server, because the server is what a browser communicates with in order to fetch Web pages. Without the server, your Web site is just a bunch of files sitting in your computer that only you can access.

Unlike a Web site, a Web server is complicated to set up and (especially) to maintain. In fact, there are all kinds of reasons not to run the Web server software yourself, even if you're technically inclined. I'll get to that later, but consider this: If I don't run a Web server, why should you? Let someone else run the Web server for you on their own computer. This is called Web hosting and it'll get your site up and running a lot faster than setting up your own Web server.

Web Server Confusion Sometimes Web server refers to the physical computer that the Web server software runs on, as opposed to the software itself. To avoid this confusion, I always say Web server to refer to the software and server computer to refer to the computer on which the Web server runs.

The Web Address

Every public Web site has a Web address that distinguishes it from other sites. The address includes a host name and a domain name. The host name is the name of the computer on which the Web server software runs. The domain name is the public name for a group of computers.

For example, the Web address www.EricGiguere.com has the host name www (for World Wide Web) and the domain name EricGiguere.com. In some cases, the address includes additional information after the domain name, but usually the host name and domain name together are enough to locate a Web site. The host name is important when there are two or more Web servers in a domain, but can normally be dropped otherwise. By convention, the primary Web site in a domain uses the special host name www.

Your site will need a Web address, so you'll need to obtain a domain name. Finding the right name is harder than it seems. Ideally, the domain name will directly relate to your site's content, because AdSense uses the Web address as one of its inputs when it tries to figure out what your site is really aboutso choosing a good name is important.

History of the Web

An excellent and authoritative history of the Internet and the World Wide Web can be found on the Internet Society's site, www.isoc.org/internet/history/.