HTML Tutorial - Getting Started With HTML

This is a tutorial I wrote when I finally got my head around HTML. Hopefully you will find it useful!

The purpose of this tutorial is to teach you the basics on how to create your own Webpages. So here we go...

What is HTML?

HTML stands for the HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the major language for creating websites on the Internet today. Just about every website is created in HTML. HTML files are plain text files, so they can be created and edited on any type of computer... Windows, Mac, UNIX, whatever.

Before You Start

Before you start your page, there are a few things you may need. Firstly, a HTML Editor, but if you don't have one of these, which you probably don't have, you can just use a text editor such as Notepad. That's what I normally use. All that a HTML Editor does is supply you with all the HTML stuff that you can use, but after you study all my tutorials you probably won't need one. But just in case you want to check out the HTML editor that I use from time to time, go to: http://www.coffeecup.com

There are also WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors available which are much easier than a text or HTML editor and you hardly even need to know any HTML at all. But I recommend learning the basic of HTML. Some of the more popular WYSIWYG editors are called Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver

With HTML you can have bold and italicized, Larger and Smaller, or it could look like Typewriter Text. You can even color it!

What you've just read in text, two paragraphs above, will look like this in HTML:



HTML code for this looks like a lot of gobbledygook, doesn't it?.

So what do these "<" and ">" things do and what are they called? They're called "lesser than" and "greater than" and when you place a certain word within these, you are making something known as a HTML Ttag. For example the <b> tag is saying to start bold text, and the </b> tag is saying to stop bold text. The tag with the slash (/) is known as the closing tag. Most opening tags require a closing tag, but not all do. Tags make up the entire structure of a HTML document.

Here is an example:

<b>This Is Your Text</b>

<b> = Opening Tag
</b> = Closing Tag

Within just about every HTML Tag has its own little settings within it. Here's an example:



Instead of the plain <hr> we have added some more settings to make it a little more interesting. Each tag has it's own settings. Some settings will only work on certain HTML Tags. You will see this as you read on in this tutorial.

Contents

Now that you know what HTML is, here is what you should expect to read in this tutorial:

Page #2 - Document Structure & Heading Tag

Page #3 - Line Tag & Paragraph Tag

Page #4 - Break Tag & Font Tag

Page #5 - The Bold, Italic And Underlined Tag Linking Text And Images 5

Page #6 - List Tags

Page #7 - Table Tag

Page #8 - Frame Tag

Page #9 - Color Chart