Web Guide/The Very Basics

🌱 Make a Website

The Very Basics

Let's do the thing. First of all, make sure you have a desktop computer or laptop (i'm just going to say "desktop" from now on to save time); you can technically follow along using a mobile phone or iPad but, for the time being, this guide won't cover how to do that. If you don't own a desktop, pretty much every public library will have some that you can use for free.

The first thing you'll need to do is create a folder on your computer, which will contain all the files for your website. If you don't have any experience working with files and folders, now is a good time to learn!

Setting up your website

Select your operating system:

Windows macOS Linux Haiku

Windows

macOS

1.  Open the Finder and pick a folder to place your new site into (it doesn't really matter where, "Documents" is a solid choice).
2.  Press ⌘ + Shift + N to create a new folder.
3. Give it a name and press return.
4. Now, open TextEdit.
5. If it doesn't start a new document automatically, click "New Document" or press ⌘ + N to do that.
6. HTML is a plain text format, so we need to go to Format > Make Plain Text (or press ⌘ + Shift + T) to make TextEdit treat it as such.

This is roughly what you want it to look like

1. Go to File > Save (or press ⌘ + S) to save the file. It should pop open a dialog asking you where to save the file.
2. Where it says "Save as:", type index.html. In the "Where:" field, navigate to the folder you created earlier (you might need to click the little down arrow to get a proper file picker).
3. Click Save. If it interrogates you about the .html extension, select "Use .html".
4. You're ready to start editing your website!

Linux

Haiku

1. Find a folder to place your new site into (your home folder will work fine).
2. Create a new folder, call it whatever you want.
3. Open that folder, right click and select New → text file and call it index.html. This will be your site's homepage.
4. Right click the newly created file and select Add-ons → FileType.
5. In the window that appears, type text/html into the "File Type" field and then close it.
6. You can now double click your index.html file to open it in WebPositive.

Note that WebPositive's developer tools are currently fairly lacking, so you may want to install a browser like Falkon from the HaikuDepot.