WoA's 'Creating a Website' dumb questions thread

Wings_of_Ambition

Hi all,

So I took the plunge and decided to get myself a website. Nothing commercial, just a bog standard personal website for friends and family to have a nose around. A bit of a playpen for me too, to get to grips with sitebuilding for when I decide to do something a bit more professional.

I registered a domain with 123-reg, bought hosting from Macoman, whom I have transferred the domain across to, and have one line of text now published on the World Wide Web... woohoo!

However, there are lots of questions that are extremely simple, but that I simply dont know the answer to, so was hoping I could use some of the expertise here on MSE. Hopefully any other website-building 'noobs' will find this useful.

So, first question is:

1/ I plan to have several pages to my website, i.e. index, page1, page2, etc... When I upload them via my ftp thingy, they will all be stored in the same folder (called 'public_html'). Do the links between these pages need to be the full link, or do I just put the page name. For example, if I want to link to page1 from the index page, which of the following do I use for the link:

Option a) "http://www.mywebsite.com/page1.html"
Option b) "page1.html"


Thanks!

tigermatt

You can just use page1.html so long as the page is on the same domain which it is.

You can also use ../page1.html to go back up the folder tree, so for example:

public_html
|folder1
||page11.html
||page12.html
|folder2
||page21.html
index.html

So if you want to link to index.html from the page called page21.html, you can just type ../ which moves the current directory into public_html so you can then type index.html meaning it would be ../index.html. Use multiple ../ for going up more than one directory.

I hope this helps!

mikemoate

Well done WoA. It's ages since I done my website building and I haven't been very good at updating it. At the time i used a book called "Create your own website in a weekend." As I recall you can actually test out your web on your computer before uploading it. Again as I recall you should be able to create folders on the server to upload segments of your web, e.g if you want to keep photo's in a seperate folder or different subjects. This makes it easier for you to navigate. You just need to be sure that the what you upload mirrors what you have on your home machine, and you can use the short links e.g start.whatever for your links remebering to include the folder name if you go down that road.

wolfman

Ok, say you have an images folder:
public_html/images

and you're at the page:
public_html/photos/index.html

You can link to the images by:
"/images/image1.jpg" - the slash at the beginning will always throw you back to the very root of your web application.

or
"../images/image1.jpg" - the ../ basically means jump back a directory. So you could have ../../../ and it'd jump back 3 directories.

or
"http://www.mydomain.com/images/image1.jpg" - the above two are "relative" paths, this is an "absolute" path. It's generally always best to use relative paths instead of absolute ones.

The same applies to pages.

Pages can also being automatically picked up.

Like http://www.mydomain.com/photos/index.html can be simply put as:
http://www.mydomain.com/photos/ and the webserver will still serve up the index.html page.

tigermatt

wolfman wrote:

It's generally always best to use relative paths instead of absolute ones.

...Just incase you suddenly move your website to a different domain and then you would have to replace all of the absolute paths with the new ones. :rolleyes:

Wings_of_Ambition

Okay, next two dumb questions:

1/ I have created a 'subpage' (probably not the official term). Lets call it "John.html". Currently, if someone types in http://www.mywebsite.com/John, they get the error page, and it only works if they type the '.html' bit at the end of the URL. Is there a way of setting the page up so that the '.html' bit is not required, and typing the above URL will bring up the John page.

2/ Please dont giggle if this is two steps beyond stupidity! Having a look through 'HTML Tutorial' websites, some of them mess around with javascript. Would people viewing my webpage need to have the Java program enabled (i.e. the one sometimes required to play games and view animations)?

Cheers

WoA

sweven

Hi WOA

https://www.mywebsite.com/john means the subfolder john on your domain.
https://www.mywebsite.com/john.html means the file called john.html in the root folder of your domain.

If you really needed someone to get the file john.html when they've asked for the folder john, it is possible, either by tweaking the settings on your server (I don't think you want to do this) or by creating a new default page in the folder john which redirects to john.html. I don't think you really want to do any of this.

If you want a website with the address https://www.mywebsite.com/john then just do that - create that website in the john folder. Anyone going to https://www.mywebsite.com/john will be presented with the default page inside that site.

(Different servers are set up with different default pages. The default usually is the same in the root folder and any sub-folders on the domain. Default pages may be called any of a number of different names depending upon the server setup - eg index.html, index.htm or default.htm etc.)

To all intents and purposes you can consider javascript and java to be two completely different languages. You're not likely to ever program java and can forget about it other than perhaps using it to add a game or an unusual image effect on your site. Visitors to your site would need java installed on their machine to see these.

Javascript on the other hand can be very useful, but I'd advise you to become fairly confident with HTML first. The most common use of javascript is to get the computer of someone viewing your site to do something like perhaps, add the current date and time into your pages, or check that someone has filled in all the boxes in a form before they press the submit button. Javascript is built into most browsers, so no download is needed, but people can switch it off if they are worried about security so there's no guarantee that your javascript will work every time your page is viewed.

cheers

Sweven

billieboy_2

Another dumb question (no offence to the OP!). I have created a new website. Can I get rid of my old website by just deleting the old files through my FTP? I know I have tried to get pages off previously (to tidy up) by downloading them but they seem to still remain there.

Astaroth

Yes, deleting the page will remove it though it will take a while for the likes of Google to remove it from their index (if it is there).

You ideally want to give your pages meaningful names, if you want search engines to rank the page highly, as this is believed to be one of the criteria used in the ranking process (eg John.html rather than page2342.html)

billieboy_2

Thanks for your prompt reply. Won't the new website just replace the old one in search engines?

nickmack

billieboy wrote:

Thanks for your prompt reply. Won't the new website just replace the old one in search engines?

Yes, if your old one is currently in Google then it should crawl over the new site. If it finds the index page name has changed then you might want to give it a nudge by resubmitting the URL to Google when the new site is up. Otherwise it should find the new site without a problem.