Step 1: Creating a Web file

OK. How do we create a web page?

The thing about web pages, is they're so...well graphic. I mean they have all these neat images. Some are just drawings or pictures that have been pasted on, such as

and others move and do all kinds of things, like this one:

Or they can be scanned in images from photographs, or images created with a digital camera, for instance, look at this computer geek:

So how are these images put into a web page? Glad you asked. To put in an image, we need to specify an image tag. Remember, a tag is HTML words in a special format to let a web browser know what to do, in this case, get a specified image file and display it in a certain place on a web page. An image tag is in the form of:

. The way to interpret the tag is "show an image whose source file is called imgtag.gif. This file is in the folder pictures. But to get to that folder, we have to climb out of the current folder we are in, and then at one level higher up, we need to go over to the folder called pictures. The double periods mean climb up one level in the directory hierarchy."

The image you are displaying doesn't have to be on the same computer as your web page. We can also specify the images to be on another computer, somewhere else in the big cyberspace we call the Internet. In that case, we would specify the URL of the image like so:

Now you can't put just any type of image file in a web page. You can only put two standard file types. These are GIF files and JPEG (also called JPG) files. So remember, if you are scanning in a picture with a scanner, or creating one with Paint Shop Pro (PSP4), then save the image as either a GIF or JPEG.

To get you started, there are lots of images in the folder called pictures. To see what their names are, click here. Remember, you can't just go out on the Internet and take any picture and put it on your web page. Those pictures, unless they are "in the public domain", are owned by whomever made them. Anything in the public domain is ok for anybody to use. If it is not in the public domain, then you need to ask whomever made the image whether you can use it. So be a good cyber citizen and be ethical. The images in the pictures folder are "in the public domain" so you can use them. Some of them are actually animated.