FAQs
How a website is built -
for the non-technical
OK, don't panic. I'm just going to tell you how a website is built. If I succeed you'll be in a much better position to manage and maintain your website and communicate with your web developer to best effect.Here are the main bits:
- Page templates - control the overall layout of pages and menus.
- Section templates - control the layout of smaller parts of pages.
- Stylesheet - controls the way your website looks.
Page templates
Page templates are written in HTML5, which is a language used to lay out content on the page so that each page conforms to a properly designed layout. Developers can produce lots of different page templates but it's best to stick with one or two, or maybe three at a push.Keeping things in the same place on each page (especially the navigation) is very important because it allows your visitors to quickly get to grips with how to find stuff on your web pages.
HTML is not hard to understand, but the devil is in the details and a little knowledge can be dangerous, so it's best left to a competent HTML coder. Here's some HTML:
<h1>Right angle sprockets</h1>
<p>Here are full details of our high performance right angle sprockets</p>
<img src="right-angle-sprocket.jpg">
The <h1></h1> tags (h = heading) tell search engines that the words in between are pretty much the most import words on the page. By default this is rendered in a large bold type but the stylesheet can change the way it looks completely. There are up to six heading levels, h1 to h6.
The <p></p> tags indicate a regular paragraph.
The <img> tag renders an image. In this case the file name for the image is right-angle-sprocket.jpg
The stylesheet
The stylesheet is a separate text file that contains information about how your web pages should look.
Web pages don't have to have a separate stylesheet. Styles can be applied inline, all mixed up with your content and HTML code. This is messy, hard to maintain and generates large, slow loading pages.
So, a separate stylesheet is a good idea. Make a change to the stylesheet and instantly all your pages look different, from a minor change of font size to a completely different layout.
Stylesheets (Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short) are not hard to understand, and once you get a grip on the basics you will be able to read a stylesheet and understand what it does. Becoming expert takes a long time however, so we recommend that this is left to experienced CSS coders. People who are expert in HTML are usually also expert at CSS. The two go hand in hand.
h1{color:gold;font-style:italic}
This means render all top level headings in italicized gold characters.