What’s a Web Page?

The Web pages which appear on the screen of your computer look very different when they enter from the Internet.

Web pages are posted on Web sites, and enter your computer, as nothing more than plain text from a wordprocessing program. (ASCII text for the computer types.) They are really nothing more than “” for the Web page. The fact that they are ordinary text documents is the reason a Web page created on a Macintosh can be viewed by a PC and vice versa.

The job of turning those blueprints into the great-looking pages on your screen falls to a program called a “browser” The vast majority of Web users rely on one of two such programs: Netscape Navigator; or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

What do I need to create my own web page?

Don’t rush off to the computer store to buy special software such as Adobe’s PageMill or Claris Homepage. Web pages are easy to create without special software. You’ll save money, and understand your page better, if you do not use special software.

All you really need is a simple wordprocessing program (e.g., SimpleText or NotePad) that can save your document as plain text (ASCII text). Virtually every popular wordprocessing program can do this. If you’re not sure, check the manual. You’ll also need a Web browser to see your pages, but you probably already have a browser since you’re looking at this Web page.

Aren’t Web pages pretty complicated?

They can certainly look like it. When you look at your first Web page (not what appears on your screen, but rather the "code" that the Web page author actually writes) it looks pretty difficult. It’s not. Anyone can do this!

The secret is to keep it simple. Web pages can be produced by those who know five simple Web-page skills:

• Headlines (The bold-faced headings on this page are headlines).
• Ordinary text (The words you see in the paragraphs after the headlines).
• Lists (You’re looking at a list right now).
• Links (Where you click on some underlined words and are transported to another Web page).
• Images (Finding and placing pictures on your page).
• Tables (The links at the end of this page are contained in a table).

Won't my Web page be boring?

That's up to you. The important part of any Web page is the content. If your page contains interesting and useful information, people will keep coming back to it.

A simple page with good content is far superior to a complicated page with nothing to say. The Fredonia Central School District Web Site is constructed with this in mind. Our pages are basic in construction (and designed to work on most browses), but are visited thousands of times each month because there is useful information contained in them.

OK, Let's get started!

This page is like “base.” You can come back here to link to a particular lesson, or you can go right from one lesson to the next. You're free to look at the lessons in any order, but it is suggested that you look at them in the order in which they are arranged. Here they are: