Meet John and Bob

👨: Hello Bob, I am John. I am 40 yrs old and I started my career in my early 20s in a burger chain as a Crew team member and grew up the ladder. Although I love my job, I see a lot of youngsters are into computers and are making unicorn startups. I have great ideas but I don't know how to code. Of course, I can hire some developers and follow the shortcuts to get my idea into reality but I want to travel the hard path of building the stuff myself just like I grew in my career. I want to start by building a website showcasing my idea to understand the consumer's interest and I need your help in guiding me step by step on how to reach there without any shortcuts.

👨‍💻: Hi John, it's good to know about you and your vision. Let's start with the basics and understand what a website is and some history about the internet itself.

Internet

The Internet ¹ is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices.

Computer scientists Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are credited with inventing ² the Internet communication protocols we use today and the system referred to as the Internet.

The Internet carries many applications and services, most prominently the World Wide Web.

WWW

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee ³, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

Why Everyone needs a website?

Back in the day, a business card was an indicator of being in business. It told the world what you were about and where you were heading.

Today, the same can be said for your website. If you run a business, do freelance work, or even work as an employee, a website has become indispensable.

Digital Presence

A “digital presence” ⁴ simply refers to how your business appears online; it’s what people find when they search for your business or company on the internet. Digital presence includes content that you control, like your website and social media profiles, but also content that you don’t control, such as online reviews.

It’s simple: you should have a strong digital presence because your customers are online, and they are turning to the internet to find solutions to their problems. When people search for you online, they will want to learn who, what, where, when, and why:

Who: Who are you? What’s your name? What brought you to where you are today? What is your story? Who works for you?

What: What does your business do? What solutions do you offer? Do you provide a service or a product?

Where: Where you are located? Do you have more than one location? What’s the address? Are you primarily online-based or located in a geographic area?

When: When are you open? Are you closed on holiday? Are you available 24/7, or are you seasonal?

Why: Why do you do what you do? Why is it important to you? Why does it matter to your audience?

A strong and positive digital presence will clearly and easily answer all of these questions. However, you can also leverage your digital presence and use it to make more sales.

What do you need to know to create a website?

The basic technologies to know to create a website are:

HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) ⁵ is the code that is used to structure a web page and its content. For example, content could be structured within a set of paragraphs, a list of bulleted points, or using images and data tables.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets ⁶ is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML.

JavaScript

JavaScript ⁷ , often abbreviated JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS used to add interactivity to web pages.

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) ⁸ is an application-layer protocol for transmitting hypermedia documents, such as HTML. It was designed for communication between web browsers and web servers, but it can also be used for other purposes.

👨‍💻: That's quite a bit to digest for today. We just got to know about the internet, www and why there is a rush to create web pages, and the technologies used to create them. Next, we shall see how to create a web page using HTML and how its rendered in a web browser.