Web Guide/The Very Basics

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🌱 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:

Linux

fuuckkk... uuhhhh.. okay. uh

So there are a lot of different Linuxes and they're all slightly different in completely inscrutable ways, so it's going to be difficult to be as precise as you would with other platforms. I am going to assume that, because you're using the fucking nerd operating system for fucking nerds, you know how to create files and open a text editor on your specific flavour of Linux.

  1. Create a folder somewhere on your computer
  2. Open a text editor (such as Kwrite, Mousepad, uh, Text Editor) and create a new document
  3. Save the document as index.html within the folder you just created

Adding Things

A screenshot of my empty index.html page opened in a web browser.
How exciting!

At this point, you should have a folder with a file called "index.html" inside it.[1] You can double click the file in your file manager or drag its icon onto the "new tab" button on your web browser. You should see an entirely blank page. We haven't put anything in the file yet, so that makes sense.

Let's put some stuff on our page. For the rest of the guide I'll be making my website about my two cats, but you can of course make your website about anything you want.

Switch back to whatever text editor you're using and just start typing some stuff:

Hello! This is the homepage of Basil & Onion. They are the swamp creatures that live in my house.

Press Ctrl + S to save and then reload the page in your web browser. Hopefully, what you wrote should show up on the page!

A screenshot of two windows, the first being a TextEdit window with the above text written in it, the second a Safari window showing the same text in a serif font.
That's a website!!!

Next Up

  1. By convention, the index.html file will be served up when you don't ask for a specific file. A "home page", if you will.