What makes up websites? The simplest way to put it would be to say that a website was a bunch of pages – or webpages, to be more specific. Now when you go to any website, you’ll find that there are a few conventions that everyone seems to follow. There are few conventions to how to develop a website that everyone seems to tacitly accept. For instance, go to any online newspaper – the website of the New York Times for instance – and what do you see?

Well, there’s a lot of empty space on either side of the body of the article. And even more to the point, they don’t ever give you the whole article on one page. You always have to click on a Next Page button at the bottom. Some people think that that’s just a way for them to put more advertisements in front of you as a new page loads. But that’s not really it.

While there may be something to the advertisement angle, the most important reason they do it is because they don’t want you to have to scroll down endlessly. They know that this annoys people, and that they begin to lose touch with what they are reading.

People begin to feel lonely and cut off when something goes on for too long. Break it up into chunks, and right away, they perk right up.

If it’s a website that sells stuff, look to Amazon for how to develop a website for selling stuff that is friendly and appealing. On Amazon, every product has its own page. That page is self-contained. You know where exactly to go for the comments, you know where exactly to go for the specifications, you know where the manufacturer’s description is, and so on.

And more to the point, the fact that you know that the page only contains information about that one product makes you feel a lot more confident about what you doing. That’s an important rule to how to develop a website: avoid making your readers feel unsure of themselves.

But we’ll worry about how exactly to make webpages look friendly and readable a little bit later. Right now, we are going to really learn how to develop a website.  We are going to find out how you actually need to understand how a webpage actually works. That’s what we’re going to do right now. And we’re going to learn a very important thing about how webpages work. We are going to find out what HTML is and what it does. Click Next below, and let’s get started.

Next: HTML