Your first web page - X2Tutorials.com

First of all, we'll talk a bit about HTML. HTML is probably a term you've heard thrown about and maybe you already know what it means, but for those who don't, HTML means: (HyperText Markup Language). Its purpose in life is to give structure to the words, photos, logos, etc. (called "content") that you want to show on your site.

Historically, HTML has also been used to determine how the content looks but, after considerable real-world experience, the folks who set the standards wisely made new rules that tell the world to use HTML to only structure the content. Formating and styling the content is the business of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. We'll get to that in a later lessons, now we'll just look at plain vanilla HTML.

I’ll assume you’re using a Windows PC, so I’ll describe the procedure for this environment.

Open Notepad by clicking: Start > Programs > Accessories > Notepad.

Enter the following in Notepad (or copy and paste everything within the grey box):

<html>

  <body>

    <h1>My First Webpage</h1>

     Hi everyone, how do you like my page?

  </body>

</html>

Now we’ll save your new page, choose “File > Save as”, then in the dialog box change the location for where you want to store your pages (I suggest that you create a new folder in “My Documents” called “sites”, or something similar) and type in “Save as type” to “All Files”, and enter the file name “first.html”. Now click the “Save” button.

Now start Internet Explorer (IE) and choose File > Open (or Firefox and choose “Open file”) and load the file you just saved in the step above. You should see a finished product that looks something like this:

My First Webpage

Hi everyone, how do you like my page?

If it doesn’t look like the mock-up above, then you’ve probably got a simple typing error. Just open it back up with Notepad and fix the problem. Once it’s working properly, we’re ready to make it future proof (or, in other words, XHTML compliant).

Coding an XHTML page