The tools of the trade for website building aren’t carried in a toolbox or plucked out when needed. The tools for this business are kept on hard drives or online. They can be expensive, but they are valuable. Knowing how to use the basic tools for website building is crucial to any good site design.
Photo Software for Website Building
The most basic tool is image manipulation software. Paint Shop Pro and PhotoShop are two of the most popular programs, but they certainly are not the only ones available. These programs allow users to create their own custom images or to use stock images included in the purchase of the program. Text can be overlaid onto a graphic easily, and importing pictures from elsewhere is a snap. While getting started with image manipulation is simple, knowing all of the art-related terms is not. Layering, cropping, and shading all can be learned using help files and Internet tutorials, and these features really can give you the opportunity to make your images more professional.
Keyword Research for Website Building
Keyword research tools are another important piece of website building. Keyword research involves entering search terms related to your business and finding out based on the results how many people search for the terms. Better programs also include related terms. Google’s keyword analysis tool includes synonyms as well, so a search for “Maui vacation” would include results for “Maui vacation,” “Hawaii vacation,” and “Maui trip” among others. These tools help writers know how to target their articles. The same article may get drastically different search-engine results by using “buy” rather than “purchase,” for instance. Knowing how to read the results of keyword-tracking software is important for designing the content of a website.
Design Programs for Website Building
Websites are created, or programmed, using two methods. One is coding manually by knowing the tags to design an HTML or similar site. These programming languages vary in difficulty with HTML being the easiest to learn. Others, such as the .NET framework, can take years to master. To help with the process, several companies have software available to help with the process. A user can move around items on a website view, and the program will change the coding to make it match what the user wants.
Another type of software application for website building is the WYSIWYG (pronounced: wiz-ee-wig) editor. In these programs, the user does not see the code and needs to know nothing about how to design a site. He or she simply places various items, such as the header logo and menu buttons, on the page, and the program “codes” in the background. This code then can be uploaded to the website, and the site is made.
These tools are just the basics needed for website building. As one gets more advanced, blogging platform software, online file storage, and other programs may be necessary to design a site from start to finish. Using just these basics, however, it is possible to create a professional-looking site.
HTML, or hyper text markup language, is one of the earliest ways sites were put online. Though now HTML is automated into many website building platforms, it still helps to know the basics of the language if you need to make any major changes to your site’s design.
Starter Tags
Website building basically takes a language, HTML in this case, and converts it into the types of pages you see online. The basic header tags in HTML are what “tell” a computer how to display the coding it sees. All tags are enclosed in brackets. Each tag must have a place where it begins and ends, and the ending tags is showing with a bracket and slashes, like this:
The first tag required is the html tag. is the very first line in any document, and is the last line. This tag tells the computer what language to use when deciphering the code between the tags. If these tags are missing, everything just appears as basic text on a page. The next tag to include is the header tag. When you have a page opened and read what is in the blue bar at the very top of the screen you are looking at the header. Most header tags in website building include the name of the website. The header is simple: . Put whatever you want to appear in that blue bar within the header tag.
Next you will need to have body tags. The opening body tag – -- goes after the HTML tag, and the ending tag goes just before the ending HTML tag. Your site will begin like this:
All of your website building design will go here.
Text Tags
All text will be in Times New Roman as a default, but you can change the text by using a font tag: . You would type font, leave a space, and then put the type of font you would like, such as this example: . You also can use “Color” and “Size” within a font tag to make the font different sizes and colors. Just be careful when you are working on website building that you check the view of any fonts you use in both Internet Explorer and Firefox and also on different screen resolutions.
Special Formatting Tags
There are four basic formatting tags that will be helpful: headline, bold, italic, and underline. The tags are easy to learn. The bold tag is <b>. The italic tag is simply <i> , and the underline is <u> .
Headlines are the sub-headings within articles. Search engines value these headings more than regular font. The sub-heading tags use . You can use any number to make the heading smaller or larger.
While these tags are just the basics needed for website building, they will help you make more sense of your site development code.
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