Building your own web site is a lot easier than it was a few years ago.
Today we have some great tools to design Internet web pages, with options like Insert, Drag & Drop, WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get.
It does pay to have some knowledge of HTML, why? you might ask, because at sometime while designing your web page you might decide you want something different, something the program you are using cannot give you unless you type in a little code.
Basic HTML is pretty simple, I had my first site up and running on my second day of learning HTML. Our daughter Tracy has learnt basic HTML for fun and she had no trouble understanding the language.
I normally use Netscape Composer the program that comes with Netscape Communicator and then if I want I can add HTML to the web page I am designing as I go along. With Netscape Composer adding items like Tables is pretty simple and most of the work is done for you.
I first learned HTML using Notepad, the very simple Text Editor that comes with Windows.
Some HTML basics:
<html>
<head>
<TITLE>A Basic HTML Example</TITLE>
</head>
<body>
<H1>My HTML Page</H1>
<P>Here is a paragraph!</P>
<P>And this is another paragraph.</P>
<H1> = Headings have 6 levels, these are numbered 1 up to 6.
</body>
</html>
Everything here in between the < and > are called Tags.
This is a Tag: <P> A Paragraph Tag and </P> is the (corresponding) End Tag, end tags have a / within them.
<HTML> = Tells the Browser that HTML code is in this file.
<HEAD> = Is the part that will contain the Title.
<TITLE> = Title which is normally at the very top of the page.
</HEAD> = This is the End Tag for <Head>.
<BODY> = Contains the content of your document, note here <BODY> and </BODY> are in the example above.
<P> = Paragraphs.
Here is how you can center a paragraph.
<body>
<center>
<p>This is a centered </p>
</center>
</body>
This is a centered
Written by James M Sandbrook – 22 November 1999