Do you have a website or are you planning on creating a website in
near future? You owe it to yourself to at least learn some basic HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language). Even if someone else is creating and maintaining your website there are some basics you should know. What if that person is not available and you need to add or make changes to your website? I’ve always believed if you have a business, computer, website, or whatever, you need to know how it works. Don’t depend on someone else. Besides why pay someone else when you can do it yourself free of charge.In this article I will explain some basic HTML formats for you. Believe me it will come in handy at one point or another. I, myself, have only learned some of basics and I have been able to add, change, and make corrections on my own website by myself.
When you come across a website you like and would like to use a similar layout or text pattern, look at page in HTML code. You can do this by clicking on “View” at top of screen, then choose “Document Source” or “Source” and you can see page as a HTML document. If you are using AOL then right click on any area on page without any text or images, then select “View Source”. At first it will look like Greek to you but after learning some basic HTML it will start to make sense.
First you will need a word processor program such as Windows “Notepad” or any other word processor you might have. You are working with simple text. You will need to save your document using “save as” command and give it an html suffix, ex: Mynewdocument.html or Mynewdocument.htm (you can use either suffix html or htm).
HTML works in a simple, logical format. It reads top to bottom and left to right. What are used to set sections apart like bigger text, smaller text, bold text, underlined text are tags. Tags are commands. If you wanted a line of text to be bold you will place a tag at point you want bold text to start and a tag at end of where you want bold text to stop.
All tags start with less-than sign < and end with greater-than sign >, always. What is between these signs is tag or command. You will need to learn what tag does what. Let’s first learn bold command. The following is an example of making your text bold. The tag for bold is “B”. You can use uppercase or lowercase, it doesn’t matter. Here is an example:
This is how it will look in HTML format - This text needs to be bold
Here is how it will look when converted to normal view – This text needs to be bold Did you notice slight difference in ending tag? There is a slash / before b. That means it is end tag. Only text between start and end tags will be in bold. Now let’s add a twist by putting one of words in italics.
This is how it will look in HTML format - This text needs to be bold
Here is how it will look in normal view – This text needs to be bold There are some tags that are an exception to rule about having to have a start and end tag. You don’t have to have an end tag when using these tags. Here are some examples.
this command places a line across page. HR stands for “horizontal reference”.
this command breaks text and jumps to next line, like return key.
this command stand for “paragraph”, it does same thing as
command but skips a line.
Every page you create with HTML will need HTML tag which denotes it is an HTML document and end HTML tag will be at end of your document. The next tags will be your start Title tag
and your end Title tag . The title of your document will go in between these two tags. The title will show up in title bar on your browser when you are looking at page in normal view.
