A Basic HTML Page:
In order to code your own HTML page you need no fancy
equipment or software, all you need is a general easy to use text editor such as Notepad
or Wordpad if you are using the PC. What you do then is write down the code for the web
page and then save the document as type HTML or you can specify the "SAVE AS"
field as type HTML.
In steps:
- Open Wordpad or Textpad.
- Type in the HTML code.
- Click on "File" and then "Save As"
- Choose a location on your hard disk.
- Click on the "File Name" field.
- Type in xxxxxxxxx.html where xxxxxx is a chosen name for
your file.
- Open your web browser, and press CTRL+O, then locate your
newly created file and choose Open.
- You will then be able to see the fruits of your labour,
simple right?
This following body of text is what one will probably see
in the most basic of HTML documents:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My first homepage</TITLE>
<META NAME="keyword" CONTENT="Alex's first home page">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This is my first try at creating a
homepage!">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Hi there! Welcome to my first attempt at creating a homepage!
</BODY>
</HTML>
Before we can truly begin, one needs to remember that with
HTML, when one opens a tag, one must close the tag later on in the HTML file. If you do
not do this, the effect will spill over and you may end up with a buggy HTML code. We can
open any tag we choose as long as it is a valid HTML attribute or tag, and when we close a
tag, we must always remember to add a / slash to close. Like if say we want some body of
text to appear italised, we open it with <I> and we close it using </I>/ Now
we can begin to examine the basic HTML document.
HTML
TAG |
|
Relevant
Explanations |
<HTML>
</HTML> |
|
Any HTML document should begin with a <HTML> opening
tag and end with a </HTML> tag. This is not crucial to the programming but for the
sake of good practice, and to aid the older browsers to recognise that this is a HTML
document we need to specify this. |
<HEAD>
</HEAD> |
|
This is what we call the header section of the HTML
document, it contains information for search engines and your browser to access and decide
what to do or display for your homepage. It also hides certain information that your
visitor does not need to look at, but is essential for your browser. |
<TITLE>
</TITLE> |
|
This tag specify the title of the web page. One usually
will be able to see the title of the homepage at the top of the Netscape Program Bar. It
should read "Alex's first home page - Netscape" |
| <META> |
|
This is the tag that you specify if you want to help
search engines such as Yahoo! and Excite! to index (add) your homepage to their database,
so when anyone does a search for the words first home page, your site will be seen at the
top of the search results page. |
<BODY>
</BODY> |
|
This is where the majority of the HTML code should go in,
anything encased within these 2 tags will be shown to your visitor, you will learn more
about adding links and controlling the layout of your HTML pages a bit later on. But for
now, keep these lessons in mind. |
For your convenience, here is the BASIC HTML
document again so you can copy and paste it to be your template for your future pages. The
parts that can to be altered is in brown colour.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Insert homepage title here.</TITLE>
<META NAME="keyword" CONTENT="Insert keywords here">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Insert homepage description here.">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Include HTML codes in here.
</BODY>
</HTML>
Now that we have learnt the basic HTML document, we can
then learn to add background colours and specify what colour our text, active links and
visited links should be, in the section, specifying our HTML's background and colour
scheme.
Notes from Alex:
If you found my guidance helpful, please drop
a note by my guestbook! So I know that you have dropped by and benefitted from my efforts,
it took me quite sometime to get these tutorial up! Click on home
and then SIGN GUESTBOOK! I will also visit your homepage and will sign your guestbook too.
|
