A beginner's guide to HTML

A website can be used for personal use as well as for promoting your business. Almost all companies and even individual stores have their own websites. So if you want to promote your business you can create a website or you can get one for exploring your creativity by sharing you're creations on your website. Anyway whatever be the purpose of your website be, it can only be made by HTML. There are also lots of other scripts like JavaScript and XML, but the basic language used for creating web pages is HTML, the abbreviation of Hyper Text Markup Language.

Applications for creating HTML files

For typing the HTML code all you need is a simple text editor that is available on your operating system by default. In Windows you can use Notepad' and in Linux use your Gedit' application. There are also several other HTML editors available on the internet for free which has some additional features. Notepad++ is one among them. Okay, you may use the one that you feel worth.

Learning the basic structure

A basic structure will give you an idea on how HTML code is written; you'll get a clear picture about the tags used in the basic structure while you read on the rest of the article. Welcome Thus you can see that the tags once opened must be closed after it's use.

Understanding the tags

HTML is mad of several tags, before getting into the basic structure; we'll see the common tags used in HTML. All tags are written between ' symbols. Following are the most used tags. : The entire HTML code is written in between html tags, it is the the root tag. : The header of area of the page is included in this tag. It has the instructions to the browser. : The title of the page is written here, this is the title which is displayed on the browser window (or the tabs) : meta tag holds the keywords of your web page and this is really important for search engine optimization : When you're adding an external script into your HTML script for adding some other features on your page.

For instance, for embedding a JavaScript on your web page you should insert it in between this tag. : body tag contains all the content of your web page that is displayed in the browser window for the surfer to see and access. : For creating a website with more than one page, you should definitely have some links between your pages. You may also have to link to the pages of other websites, this tag is used for creating a link to a URL. -: For creating headings for your page with different sizes, makes your headings largest while makes it the smallest. You can also use

,

, & . Now you can easily say the output of the basic structure we've written before.

Tags for formatting the text

: for displaying your content in paragraphs, wherever you add a

tag, there starts a new paragraph.
: Line break- for leaving lines blank in between. , , : used for making your letters bold, underlined and italics respectively.

Creating and managing tables

For creating tables and managing them, the following tags can be used : All the data you need to include in the table are written between these tags. : A cell or a column is represented by this tag : This tag is used for creating new rows in the table.

Some other important ones

: used for defining a section, for example the alignment of the your content can be defined using these tags. : We may have to use other files in our web pages such as flash movies, for this we use object tag.

Getting more practical

All these tags must be included in the proper way in your HTML code for getting the best results without any mistakes. You need more practice for getting everything right. But you can easily create web pages once you've got an idea about tags and the basic rules on using them, because all it needs is simple logic. We've seen the basic structure before (you may refer it once again). Now let's use more tags we've seen. My Favourite writers

Arthur Conan Doyle

Shakespeare

Victor Hugo

(Note:

is used for arranging the words as a list) This output of this code will be a web page with "My Favourite writers" as the title and the name of the three writers in the page listed one below the other in bold letters.

Saving and testing your creation

After typing the html code open the Save' dialogue box from your text editor (File > Save) and give the file name yourname.html', here we've given the extension .html' and thus your file will open in your default browser while double clicked and shows the output of your html code, you can go to view > source' from your task bar for further editing the HTML.

Inserting images

Inserting images is also just another easy task. For inserting an image, first copy and paste the image into the folder where you're going to save the html file. Then add the following code between the body tags, wherever necessary. here add the file name of your picture instead of "Mypicture" and change .jpg' with your image extension. If your file is a .png, .gif, .bmp or something else use add it instead of .jpg.

Adding picture from websites

For adding the picture from an external website just insert the URL of the picture, for example if the URL is 'http://www.example.com/images/flowers.jpg', then just modify your code as follows:

Adjusting the width and height of the picture

Some images may have high width and height and covers a good portion of the window, to avoid that you may adjust the size of the picture. Check the following code: here, by adding the figures on width and height we control the area of the picture.

HTML tips for search engine optimization (SEO)

You can use the following tips forgetting better rank on search engines. Give a good title: Many search engines will search for the keywords between your title tag in their formula of ranking, do give short and sweet titles for your web pages. Avoid frames: Frame is an HTML page which makes all other pages with the same structure. Unfortunately, many search engines do not support frames, so a website without a frame could get better ranking that yours, so the best solution for this problem is to avoid frames.

Format of your pages: HTML links are tracked by many search engines i.e. your website may contain more than one page and there will be links for connecting them and search engines traces other pages with these links more effectively, if you use Flash in your website and even for linking, your pages may go down in rankings. Keywords are important: People search with search engines using key words and so inserting keywords in your website is rally important since it is also a major factor which decides your rank in the listing. Anyway some search engines including Google are not giving much importance for keywords since people use hundreds of keywords for a page. But some search engines including AltaVista still uses it. So use keywords in your pages and try to limit the number in between 15-20 maximum.

Software for Visual HTML editing (WYSIWYG software)

Now there are many software available, by which you can easily create HTML pages. Using these you can create pages just like you create in any Word Processor. Microsoft FrontPage is very famous for this. I also recommend Coffeecup HTML editor and Coffeecup Visual Site Designer, which are very easy and provide a lot of good features. Adobe Dreamweaver is also used for this purpose and it's a little more complexed and also more powerful. Here is the list of some popular WYSIWYG: Adobe Dreamweaver: http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/ (open source)

Amaya : http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ (commercial) N|vu: http://www.net2.com/nvu/ (open source) Microsoft Expression Studio: http://microsoft.com/expression/ (commercial [also available for free])

Zend Studio: http://zend.com (commercial) Coffeecup software: http://coffeecup.com (commercial) :They provide many tools you need for website creation for a worthy price.

Some recommended online learning resources

HTML is not limited to this, as you know. There are so many other tags for HTML and sometimes they do get complicated. So you can find great and awesome tutorials on the following links, which've helped me a lot in learning HTML for creating web pages.

http://w3schools.com/htmL

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/

http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/

http://www.echoecho.com/html.htm

Publish it on the web

You've created a web page and now you want to publish it on the web. You may first go for a free account with sub domain hosting before spending for a custom domain. For this you may try websites like Freeservers or Homestead. After signing up with them go to the control panel > File manager and upload your html pages and all other files associated with it. For example you've added a picture in your web page which was saved in the same folder with the html page, you must upload it in the same directory where you've uploaded the html page when you upload it your website. Many webs hosts now provide online web creating tools by which you can create eye catching websites easily and within no time. Website is the best way to explore anything to the world. Many people may use it for bad or evil, but let's put it to some good, let's share our knowledge and ideas using these services with world and make good relationships across the globe.