What’s needed to create a web page with HTML? If you have never used HTML before the author suggests not purchasing or downloading any software at all. If you have Microsoft Windows, you already have everything you need. For those of you who do not have Microsoft Windows, most other operating systems have something similar.
Here’s what you must have (for basic HTML):
- A text editor (use notepad if you have Windows)
- A web browser (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer)
That’s it!
You use the text editor (notepad) to write the code and then save the code as an HTML file. To save the notepad file as an HTML file follow these steps:
- Click “File”
- Select “Save As” from the drop down menu
- Click the drop down menu for “Save as Type:”
- Select “All Files”
- In the “File Name” text box type the name of your web page “your webpage” then type “.html”. (Example: yourwebpage.html) (Note: make sure it does not say .txt behind it.)
- Click “Save”
And you’re done.
To view your web page:
- Find your saved file
- Right Click on the file
- Select “Open with Internet Explorer”
After following all of these steps you will see a blank HTML Page. Let’s move on to making a simple HTML page.
Creating a web page with basic HTML is easy. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is used as the basis for almost all web pages you ever have encountered online.
It’s easiest to think of HTML as a set of formatting codes to get text to do stuff for you. There are a set of rules you must always follow when working with HTML.
- You must ALWAYS save your documents as a web page, there are many different extensions you can use to save your document, for this article always save your files as .html files.
- Tags ALWAYS have a Start Tag <> and an End Tag </>. End Tags always have a slash mark.
- You must ALWAYS start your HTML document with the following tag <HTML>
- You must ALWAYS end your HTML document with the following tag </HTML>
- Capital or Lower Case text is okay for tags
(These rules will make more sense in a few seconds)
To start your first HTML web page:
Open up a new notepad document or use the one you just created. Type the start and end tags for HTML. All the other HTML code will be in between these two tags:
<HTML>
</HTML>
Make sure to save the document as a web page. After you have done this, you will have created a basic HTML web page that you can use over and over again as a template.
Now that you have the HTML Basics to building a web page we can move on to adding content to the page.