A Guide to HTML Page 1
Whilst HTML is a relatively straight forward language you need to ease yourself gently, so let’s begin:
Equipment
Before you can even write your first line of HTML you need the right equipment, fortunately all you need is a basic text editor and Notepad is ideal - something that comes with every computer. To open Notepad click the Start button, select All Programs, Accessories and click on Notepad. You now have everything you need to write HTML!
What does HTML look like?
HTML is a series of “tags”, each tag starts with a less-than sign < and end with a greater-than sign > with the command in between. Each tag should be on its own line, this keeps things tidier and makes it much easier for you. You can start a new line by pressing the return key on your keyboard.
Your first line
Every page must start with an HTML tag, this tells your browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox for example) that the page is written in HTML. So open Notepad and at the very top type:
<HTML>
Congratulations you’ve written your first line of HTML, that wasn’t too painful was it!
The head
Just like a good pint, every webpage needs a HEAD tag. This is where you can put the title and other advanced things that you may encounter later in your webmastering career. So underneath the HTML tag type:
<HEAD>
The next tag you need is the TITLE tag. This is how you write things in the title bar of the web browser, if you look to the top left of your screen you’ll see “Valcato Hosting - A Guide to HTML” this is done using the TITLE tag. So beneath the HEAD tag, type:
<TITLE>Valcato Hosting - A Guide to HTML</TITLE>
Obviously change what you write so that it describes what’s on your webpage, or the title of your website. You’ll notice that at the end we also wrote /TITLE, this tells your web browser that the title has ended.
To finish the head, type:
</HEAD>
So just to summarise what you should have so far:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My First Webpage</TITLE>
</HEAD>
Next: A Guide to HTML Page 2