Web design has perhaps never been more accessible as a tool than it is now. At the same time, the numbers of websites launched daily has also reached an all-time high. Given that the World Wide Web (a phrase one rarely hears these days) has an infinite capacity, saturation isn’t an issue. Hence, the proportion of the world’s population who will personally design web pages at some point is ever growing.
What is involved, as far as the language of the computer goes, is known to only the small minority who make this specialist world their own. Programming languages are so numerous that even the most devoted programmer is familiar with only a handful. But for the Average Joe or Joanna with a website, blog and Twitter, the basic tools have all been made easy to use with virtually no grasp of the underlying principles. Thanks to technologies like wireless internet for laptops, the virtual world is at our fingertips anytime we want.
A striking characteristic of the average IT-literate ‘techie’ is a willingness to share – at no charge – their know-how. The tutorials and step-by-step guides these generous souls have provided make getting clued up a breeze. Among the most useful devices is the family of internet codes that includes FTP. Standing for File Transfer Protocol, FTP is used by all of us to transfer files from our hard drive to the server, thus making it available to others. Better known as ‘uploading,’ the free software to carry it out is easily available if, by chance, it isn’t already on your computer.
HTML is the abbreviation for the rather jazzier-sounding HyperText Mark-up Language. This, of course, produces the text that appears on a web page, and anyone can learn to do it. The cheat’s way is to open an HTML assistant and just follow the prompts. But the slightly braver can quickly acquire the skills to write HTML themselves via any one of those handily available tutorials.
Embarking on familiarization with internet codes and languages needn’t be put off any longer.