According to CERN, web authoring is the process of creating web documents, that is, web pages or collections of such pages on the same or related subjects that can be displayed on a screen using a program called a web browser. Web publishing is the process of making web documents available to the public on web servers.

Several excellent articles and tutorials on this subject are available online, free of charge. Two particularly useful ones are: Web Style Guide (www.webstyleguide.com) by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, which is also available in book form, and John Shiple's tutorial on information architecture on the Webmonkey site for website development (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/design/site_building/tutorials/tutorial.html). The topic which both of these stress as being of particular importance in web authoring is information architecture.

Deciding the Information Architecture

The first step in designing a website should be deciding its information architecture (although this has often not been the case in practice, especially outside the advanced industrial countries). In Staple's words:

The term information architecture (IA) refers to the structural design of shared information environments or spaces.