Getting Started

OK, lets get straight into it. Here, you will learn just how easy it is to create a web page. In fact, by the time you've finished with this web page, you will have created your own web page!

When you create a web page you will usually do something like this:

Create an HTML file

Type some HTML code

View the result in your browser

Repeat the last 2 steps (if necessary)

Creating a Webpage

OK, let's walk through the above steps in more detail.

Create an HTML file

An HTML file is simply a text file saved with an .html or .htm extension (i.e. as opposed to a .txt extension).

Open up your computer's normal plain text editor (this will probably be "Notepad" if you're using Windows or "SimpleText" if you're using Macs). You could use a specialized HTML editor such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage if you prefer.
Create a new file (if one wasn't already created)
Save the file as html_tutorial_example.html

Type some HTML code

Type the following code:


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>HTML Tutorial Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Less than 5 minutes into this HTML tutorial and
I've already created my first homepage!</p>
</body>
</html>

View the result in your browser

Either...

Navigate to your file then double click on it

...OR...

Open up your computer's web browser (for example, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape etc).
Select File > Open, then click "Browse". A dialogue box will appear prompting you to navigate to the file. Navigate to the file, then select "Open".

Repeat the last 2 steps until you're satisfied with the result

It's unrealistic to expect that you will always get it right the first time around. Don't worry - that's OK! Just try again and again - until you get it right.

Explanation of code

OK, before we get too carried away, I'll explain what that code was all about.

We just coded a bunch of HTML tags. These tags tell the browser what to display and where. You may have noticed that for every "opening" tag there was also a "closing" tag, and that the content we wanted to display appeared in between. Most HTML tags have an opening and closing tag.

All HTML documents should at least contain all of the tags we've just coded and in that order.

The next lesson goes into a bit more detail about HTML tags.

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Link to this page (copy/paste into your own website or blog):
<a href="http://www.quackit.com/html/tutorial/getting_started.cfm">Getting Started</a> from Quackit.com
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