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So you are fed up of looking at other people’s
homepages and want one of your own? How do you go about it? How do you make
a homepage that conveys adequately, neatly and creatively information
relating to you, your business, your cat or anything you might want to share
with everyone else? Well there are basically three ways of getting that
homepage or web site you always wanted. You could pay a professional design
team to design a fancy homepage for you. But that would cost a lot and take
the fun out of doing it yourself. Besides you should only bring in the
professionals when and if you need a complex web site with extensive content
and exclusive design. Secondly you could use an editor like Microsoft
FrontPage to design your homepage. Though easy enough it might still be
inflexible for those of you who want more control. Thirdly you could code
your own homepage-using HTML. Yes you would have to learn a new language for
that but fear not! HTML is extremely easy and its basic features can be
grasped by just about anybody and sometimes within the space of a few hours.
But anyways, you are reading this because in all probability you want to
know more about HTML. If I am right you may even want to try your hand at
making your own homepage using HTML. So why wait, lets move on to the nitty
gritty of HTML.
This tutorial will teach you to write your
own HTML-based web pages without using a special bells-and-whistles HTML
editor. This way you will have a lot more control over how your web pages
look, and you'll more easily find ways to make your page look even better.
HTML is not made specifically for any platform (i.e. Windows PC or MAC), and
can be displayed on any computer with a web browser (and an Internet
connection). Because of this, all of your HTML files must be saved in
standard (ASCII) text format. The easiest way to get this format is
to use a program such as notepad.exe (Windows) or edit.com (MS-DOS), which automatically
saves it as text. If you're feeling brave, you could type your HTML into a
word processor like Word, but if you do so, when you save it, you must
select "Save file as: Text". If you mistakenly save the file as a
word processor document, it will look like garbled data when you try to view
it with your web browser.
What is HTML?
HTML stands for the Hypertext Markup Language.
HTML is the major language of the Internet's World Wide Web. Web sites and
web pages are written in HTML. With HTML and the World Wide Web, you have
the ability to bring together text, pictures, sounds, and links... all in
one place! HTML files are plain text files, so they can be composed and
edited on any type of computer... Windows, Mac, UNIX, whatever.
Create a Local Directory
I recommend that when you write your home page, you first create a
directory on your local hard drive to place the HTML files and graphics
files. On a Windows machine, you could use something like c:\homepage. Then,
when you save an HTML file, you can save it to that directory. You'll want
to save the file with an extension of .htm or .html (If you are using
Windows 3.11 or older, you cannot save a file as .html because you can only
use a three letter file extension, so instead you must save it as .htm,
which acts exactly the same as an .html.) The only file that must
have the extension .html is your main home page file, which MUST be called
index.html.
Your main home page file MUST be titled
"index.html", because this is the way almost all web servers are
set up to handle. (You can check with the techie in charge of your host/web
server if you can't get index.html to work. Some systems use other
filenames, for example: default.html)
NOTE
TO WINDOWS95/98 USERS:
If you are using notepad.exe to edit your HTML files and you type index.html
as the name of your file, notepad will automatically name it index.html.txt!
To get around this, when you save an html file with notepad, type quotation
marks around the file. Instead of typing index.html, type "index.html".
This tells notepad not to use the default .txt extension.
Viewing Your Work
If you were editing index.html with
your text editor, wouldn't it be nice to see what your page looks like while
you are editing it? Well you can! Just start up your web browser, and in the
Location: field type the location of your file on your hard drive. If you
are editing c:\homepage\index.html, just type c:\homepage\index.html in the
box next to "location:" and there it is in its full HTML Glory!
Then go back to your text editor, change a line, hit save, and click
reload/refresh with your browser! It changes!
One More Thing
If you are going to start writing HTML, I suggest you make a point of
learning to look at other authors' HTML pages. You say you're already doing
that, right? Maybe. What I mean is for you to look at the HTML document a
person wrote to present the page you are looking at. Don't look at the
pretty page, look behind it at the HTML document.
Why Should You Do That?
Because you can... but seriously, folks. Let's say you run into a page that
has a really neat layout, or a fancy text pattern, or a strange grouping of
pictures. You'd like to know how to do it. Well, look, I'm not telling you
to steal anything, but let's be honest, if you see some landscaping you
like, you're going to use the idea. If you see a room layout you like, you
will use the idea to help yourself. That's the point of looking at another
page's HTML document. I think it's also the best way to learn HTML. In fact,
I am self-taught in HTML simply by looking at others' documents. It was the
long way around, believe me. You're going to have a much easier time of it.
Here's how you look at an HTML document (known as the "source
code"):
1.
When you find a page you like, click on VIEW at the top of the screen.
2.
Choose SOURCE from the menu.
3.
The HTML document will appear on the screen.
So
now that I have given you the basic information I hope that you are
beginning to see how easy HTML can be. Just make sure you have a browser
such as Internet Explorer, an editor that would most probably be Notepad, an
Internet connection to view online lessons and access resources. In the next
article we shall start off with our first lesson. So till then take it easy,
take a few deep breaths and visualize yourself giving out your homepage
address to friends or putting it on your visiting cards instead of putting
on that blank face every time someone asks you about your homepage.
Click here for
Part II of this series
Click
here for Part III of this series
Click
here for Part IV of this series
Click here for
Part V of this series
Click here for
Part VI of this series
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