Brochure websites
Brochureware websites
Businesses should, at the very least, have a some form of web presence. A brochureware website is very good place to start - here is the Wikipedia definition of what that is:
A brochureware website is a business website that has very infrequently updated content. Often the site has been developed as a direct translation of existing printed promotional materials, hence the name. Brochureware sites therefore take little advantage of the capabilities of the web that are unavailable in printed publication.
Brochureware sites are commonly used by small businesses that need a web presence to provide contact and location information, but do not need (or want) ecommerce or other interactive features.
In design terms, brochureware sites are often produced on very small budgets, are frequently executed in static HTML, and make liberal use of stock photography.
HTML - so what is it?
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages.
HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments and other types of text-based content.
The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.
HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages.
Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicitly presentational HTML markup.
Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee built his first computer using a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television whilst he was a young man studying for a degree in Physics at Oxford University. On graduating he went on to work for companies involved in developing barcodes and data transfer technologies, but the world changed when he perfected his 1989 brainwave of the creation of a global information space.
Inspired by his then employer’s clunky internal communication system Berners-Lee imagined a tool that would allow researchers from across the world to access and gather information and data.
Finally in Tim Berners-Lee wrote the languages that made this information transfer possible: HTML, HTTP, and URL. With all this in place Berners-Lee still had no official interest in the project, but soldiered ahead and in 1991 set up the first web server for his employer CERN. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN.