Saving your masterpiece

Saving is a tricky area, and it helps if you know what you're doing on a computer for this part. But even if you don't, do not fret; I'll explain the process thoroughly.

OK, before we get to saving, please make a new folder in your home drive and call it website.

Now you need to give your document a file-extension to tell your computer what type of file this is. You are editing the page in a text-editor called Notepad, which saves in the format .txt (TeXT file) . You have written some text, but you want a file that is in the .html format, since it is meant to be a web page.

Here are the steps for saving as a web page:

1. Click File | Save As... Find the place on your hard drive where you want to keep all your pages (again, make sure you create a new folder called website to keep all of your pages together).
2. In the box labeled 'save as type' change it to 'all files *.*'. This means that you can save the data (in this case, some text) into any format.
3. Name your file index.html and click save.
4. That's it.

After you have done this once, if you ever change your code, you only need to press save, not save as, because the computer now knows this is a html file.

Your page's filename can consist of any combination of letters, numbers or _ and - characters. Never use punctuation in a webpage's name. It is a good practice to start the filename with a letter and use lowercase letters at all times. This will make sure that few capitalization-caused errors will not occur by people trying to type your page's address into their browser. You should call your homepage index.html — this will be important later on.

Question: how come I see some pages named 'something.htm'?

Well, before more recent operating systems like Windows 95, file extensions were limited to only three letters, hence htm. You could name all your files using .htm as the suffix, but there are so few people with OSs that old that you're probably better off just using .html and being done with it. And for Pete's sake, don't mix and match. Stick with one format for your entire site.

Note to users of word processors

If you're using something like Word or WordPerfect to make your pages (which is a really bad idea), you don't want to be saving all of the editor's values for margins and formatting etc. when you save your html file, as they can't be read by your browser. So when saving your file, make sure to save it as text-only, and only the things useful to your browser will get saved.

Next step> Check out your page....