Html Tutorials - Introduction

You can do it...honest

These web design tutorials were made for those of you who would like to learn how to make websites but after looking at the code of all those nice webpages on the net, thought "Whoa! this is too complicated". Well, despite looking complicated, html (the code which makes the web page ) is easy to learn. In fact it is easier to figure out then those web design editors which supposedly let you design webpages as you see it (called WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get). I don't think so. What you see may not be exactly what you get. Most of these programs add a whole lot of code that is not required, and can create some very major diffulities when it comes time to edit you page. Unless you're familiar with at least some of the code for making web pages those editors can be a real pain to use. A couple of editing programs that I have found to be rather easy to use cna be found on my RESOURCES PAGE. These programs are not free and I would not suggest them for handeling one site and these won't help much if you aren't familiar with HTML code.

So follow along in these lessons as I explain what I've learned so far while building my web sites. Hey, where ya going? I may not be a pro but I'll have you making web pages in no time so stick around.

Getting down to business
All you need to make a webpage is a browser so you can see the masterpiece your creating, and a simple word processor such as Notepad.Yup, Notepad, even for nice fancy pancy web pages. I don't know what you Macheads use but it's probably something similar so follow along.

The very first time you save your html code, you must save it as an html file. Here's what you do: go to the FILE menu, choose SAVE AS and give your document a file name, for instance "mypage". Right after the name put ."html" For example:

After your code is saved you can open it by going to the folder which contains it and double-clicking on the file. This opens the web page in your browser. To make any changes in your web page simply right-click on the opened webpage with the mouse (assuming you use Internet Explorer), choose View Source and there's the code you've written in Notepad. Once you've made the changes, save it by clicking the x in the top right corner of Notepad and choose yes when you're asked if you want to save the changes. Then click refresh in your browser to see how the web page has changed.

Netscape on the other hand requires more clicks. To be able to make changes in the code you need to first specify Notepad as your html editor by typing
C:\\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE. in the preferences dialog box. Check Netscape's help to find out exactly how it's done since it varies slightly depending on the version you use.