Learn HTML
Learn html. This html tutorial will teach you the very basics in html (HyperText Markup Language) and the codes. All websites are created in html, which is a special language used to enable all types of browsers to decipher the information to display the web page on your screen.
You can view the html codes on most web pages, if you are viewing this page using Microsoft Internet Explorer, using a standard pc, "right click" on this page with your mouse. Then highlight the selection named "view source". Upon doing this, your "Notepad" program should open containing what looks like total gobbledygook to non-html readers and you will be able to see html codes and language to construct this page.
The html language is a number of different words and commands all surrounded by < and </> which are called "tags". These are instructions in which a browser follows to indicate the layout, format and everything to do with how the page looks on your screen. Most instructions within the body of your web page must begin with the <> and end with the </> closing tags. The text between these two tags gives the instruction to the browser.
The very first html tag which should be used when creating a web page is the <html> tag. This tag tells the browser it is an html document. The next important tag is the <head> tag. This indicates the beginning of your document where other very important information should be placed. The next html tag to be used it the title tag which looks like this
<title> and </title>
. This will indicate the title of your web page or document which will tell the browser what your web page is about, and the text that is placed between these two tags will appear at the top of your screen on the blue bar. (i.e. this page's title is "html codes tutorial to learn html" in which you will see at the very top of your screen)
To Summarize, the very beginning of an html document should look link this
<html><head><title>Your Web pages Title
</title>
</head>
</title></head>
The next tags you will see are ones that you will not see anywhere on the viewable page itself, as these are special tags used for search engines to categorize your web page. These are your meta tags. These are here to describe your web page and are what search engines will use to describe your page on search results. The two most commonly used meta tags are the "description" tag and the "keyword" tag. These do not need a closing </> and they should look like this
<META NAME = "description" CONTENT = "the description of your website goes here">
< META NAME= "keywords" CONTENT = "your keywords go here, separated, by, a, comma"> </head>
On some website pages on the internet, you may see a fair few more tags contained in the heading of the document, for the purposes of this basic html tutorial, we will not deal with these.
We can then specify for background colour or image for our website page by using the the tags as follows
<BGCOLOR = "white" BACKGROUND = "your image.jpeg">
We can now begin to create the text for our document that will be visible on the page. We do this using the <BODY> and </BODY> tags. Everything that is placed inside these tags will be visible on the screens of the websites visitors.
<BODY> This is what our website is about and our viewers will be able to see this paragraph. After we have included all of our information, we now need to close the body tag by using the </BODY>
There a thousands of html tags that are available to be used to make the text on your screen look as pleasing to the eye as possible. Some of these are <BR> to create a space, like pressing the return key. The <P> tags also separates text into paragraphs.
The align tag will align your text
to the left <align="left>
Or align your text to the right<align="right">
and this tag it can also center it <align="center">
The html tags to create links can get rather complicated.They need to tell the browser which page you want to go to and also which part to click on to be taken there. A link tag contains the tag which is the anchor, and the Href tag which is where you want to go. It should look like this
<A HREF="http://thewebpageyouwanttogoto.co.uk">Click here to follow this link</A>
There are also ways to format the size of your text. There are a few ways to do this, but the one we discuss here is one that is preferred by the search engines - the H tag. The H tags you use will determine the size of the font, and its importance where search engines are concerned. The
<H1> is the biggest font size available and by using this at the top of your web pages will tell the spiders that this is the most important word or phrase. The H tags must include a closing tag - </H1>.The rest of your text would use the <H3> to <H6> sizes. You can also use the bold and italic commands. The ones the search engines prefer are the and tag. This also help point out your keywords in the text of your body copy.
You also need to be aware to the font type used. If you use a font that is available on your computer, when the website page is presented on the viewers browser, if they do not have that particular font installed on their pc, it will just use any font available. This will result in odd looking pages. The best fonts to use are the most common ones which are : Times New Roman, Helvetica, Sans Serif, Courier and Arial. By using these font will ensure your pages will look the way you intended them to.
Some web designers use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to format the style of their website pages. CSS is a totally different ball game. This can be a good way to format the style of your website design without filling up your plain text html document with font tags etc. You can even create your CSS as a separate file and have the web page link to it. The benefits of this are that the html document itself is kept as small as possible and is easy for the spiders to find your text content without having to sift through hundreds on command tags.
That's it for our basic html tutorial, we have covered the very basics to allow you to at least understand a little bit about html.
