How Websites Are Created

How Websites Are Created

All websites use HTML and CSS, but content management systems, blogging software, and e-commerce platforms often add a few more technologies into the mix.

What You See

When you are looking at a website, it is most likely that your browser will be receiving HTML and CSS from the web server that hosts the site. The web browser interprets the HTML and CSS code to create the page that you see. 

Most web pages also include extra content such as images, audio, video, or animations and this book will teach you how to prepare them for use on the web and then how to insert them into your web pages. 

Some sites also send JavaScript or Flash to your browser, and you will see how to add JavaScript and Flash in your web pages. Both of these technologies are advanced topics that you can go on to learn more about once you have mastered HTML and CSS, if you want to.

How It Is Created

Small websites are often written just using HTML and CSS.

Larger websites — in particular those that are updated regularly and use a content management system (CMS), blogging tools, or e-commerce software — often make use of more complex technologies on the web server, but these technologies are actually used to produce HTML and CSS that is then sent to the browser. So, if your site uses these technologies, you will be able to use your new HTML and CSS knowledge to take more control over how your site looks.

Larger, more complex sites like these may use a database to store data, and programming languages such as PHP, ASP.Net, Java, or Ruby on the web server, but you do not need to know these technologies to improve what the user sees. The skills you'll learn in this book should be enough to help you on that road.

HTML5 & CSS3

Since the web was first created there have been several versions of HTML and CSS — each intended to be an improvement on the previous version. 

At the time of writing this book, HTML5 & CSS3 were still being developed. Although they had not been finalized, many browsers were already supporting some features of these languages and a lot of people were using the latest code on their websites. I have therefore chosen to teach you these latest versions. 

Because HTML5 and CSS3 build on previous versions of these languages, learning these means you will also be able to understand the earlier versions of them. I have added clear notes when the code is new and also when it might not work in older browsers.