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Part 1 - The Bare Bones: Starting your web page from scratch

© Tracy Ryan

What is HTML and why should you be interested in it? HTML is the language that web browsers read so that they know how a web page should be displayed. It is a computer language (in a very broad sense of the term) but don't let that put you off. It is a relatively simple language and, to begin with you'll only need to know a bare minimum of the "HTML tags" required to get started on your very own web page. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language which is probably a moderately interesting piece of trivia that you'll forget in 10 minutes time - and that won't matter as long as you remember the important bits we're about to get to!

HTML will help you to tell web browsers how to format the text and pictures on your page. You can specify the background colour, text colour, link colours and destinations etc, as well as picture sizes and much more. We'll get to all that soon enough but for now we'll start with the basic skeleton of a web page - the few essential components to any web page that must be in place before you even think about colours and layout.

To get started you'll need a blank canvas to work on. Our canvas is going to be a new text file that we'll open in MS Notepad. You'll find Notepad on your computer by clicking the Windows "Start" button and browsing through "Programs" to "Accessories". If you don't find Notepad this way you can always just run "Notepad.exe" from the C:\Windows directory. You can use any text editing program you choose, including MS Word, but you need to be careful that you don't use the program's built in text formatting functions. Just use the basic new document as it is as font etc aren't important to us just now. So, now that you have your text document open in front of you, we're going to get to work. As mentioned above, every web page has a basic skeleton that must be included for a browser to recognise what you're trying to tell it. The first thing you'll always add to your blank page is the tag. What this tag does is tell the browser that the file it's trying to look at is written in HTML so it will know what type of information is coming next and how to deal with it. Having said that, your web page will always end with the closing tag. This pretty much just tells the browser that we're done here and it can rest up for a while.