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Sunday, October 25, 2009

Beginner's Web Site Creating Guide

Beginner's Web Site Creating Guide

Welcome to Tizag.com's introduction to HTML and web design. This short tutorial is aimed to give newbies a little experience in writing HTML code, saving their files correctly, and viewing the completed works in a web browser. Regrettably this tutorial cannot teach you the basics of using a computer, so please be sure that you meet the following requirements:
  • Know what notepad is and how to use it
  • Are able to open up a file using Internet Explorer (or the browser of your choice)
  • Know how to copy and paste text from a webpage (important!).
If you are lacking the ability of the aforementioned items please contact a local geek and ask nicely for a quick lesson.

Tutorial Overview

In this tutorial you will be transcribing code into notepad and then viewing it with a web browser. The code is called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and notepad is a commonly used text editor on Window PCs. HTML may seem confusing at first, but we will help you understand how it works in this step-by-step tutorial of how to make your first web page.

Your First Web Page

To start off with copy the following HTML code into notepad. Be sure to copy the code exactly, otherwise your web page may not function correctly.

HTML Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Own Webpage!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Welcome to my webpage</h2>
</body>
</html>
The above code is all that is required to create a basic web page!  Now save your file in notepad by selecting Menu and then Save.   Click on the Save as Type drop down box and select the option All Files.
When asked to name your file, type "index.html", without the quotes. Double check that you did everything correctly and then press save. Remember where it was saved to because you will need to open this file, soon!

Viewing Your Web Page - Web Browsers

To view your web page, you are going to have to use a web browser (of course). Web browsers are programs that interpret HTML, like what you have just copied into notepad, and transform that code into a visual representation, or a web page. Common web browsers include:

Viewing your page

To view your web page, you must open the "index.html" file inside of a web browser. Open up another browser window and then follow these instruction.
  1. In the new browser window, select File then Open
  2. Then click Browse to enter Windows Explorer
  3. Do you remember where you file is? Good, then navigate to its location
  4. When you find your file, index.html, double-click the file to open it inside your web browser
Success! You have just viewed your very first webpage.
If this did not work for you, please go through the steps again and follow the directions closely. If you still can't get this to work, please Contact Us and we will get you up and running.

First Web Page - Review

Very good! Now let's be sure that you remember what you learned in this lesson.
  1. how to copy some weird looking text (HTML) into notepad
  2. how to correctly save this weird text in notepad
  3. how to open your saved file and view the your webpage

Your Second Web Page

Now that you have created your first webpage, let us examine the different segments of your "index.html" file. You have probably noticed a pattern of various words that are surrounded with <>. These items are called HTML tags.
An example of an html tag is . The Body tag tells the browser where the page's content begins. Body is also an example of one of the required HTML tags that every web page must have.

Basic HTML Tag Information

Let's learn more about these tags. A basic web page is composed of 2 main tags. If you create a web page without these tags you will be in trouble!

HTML Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Own Webpage!</title>
</head>
<body>
Your site's content goes here
</body>
</html>
The first HTML tag, which conviently is labled  tells the browser that  your HTML code is starting. The second HTML tag,  tells the browser that the visible part of the  webpage ( your content ) is going to start.

Closing Tags -

You might be wondering what is the deal with the two tags at the end, and . These tags are telling the browser that certain tags are ending. The lets the browser know that your content is ending, while the tells the browser that your HTML file is finished.
The "/" that is placed before the tag's name informs the browser that you would like to stop using the specified tag. is used to begin a tag and is used to end a tag.

HTML Tag Order - Important!

The order that opening tags appear and ending tags appear follow an important rule. If an HTML tag is opened within another, for example the body tag is opened inside the html tag, then that tag(body) must close before the outter(html) tag is closed.
We ended the body tag first because it was opened most recently. This rule of "closing the most recent tag before closing older tags" applies to all HTML tags.

Continue Along

These ideas might take a while to sink in, so how about you create your second web page? Copy this code into notepad, like you did before, following the same directions.

HTML Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Own Webpage!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Welcome to my webpage</h2>
<p>Coming soon will be my completed webpage that will wow and impress you!</p>
</body>
</html>
After you are sure that your HTML code inside notepad is exactly the same as our provided HTML code, go ahead and save your file. You should be saving this file as "index.html". You may be prompted that you will be saving over a file, that is OK, you do not need your 1st web page anymore. When you are done, please continue.
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