How often have you wished you knew how to create a website? If you are a human, I’m going to guess the thought has at least crossed your mind. Now, if you are like a lot of people, you probably don’t know the first thing about how to go about doing that. Or maybe you do, and you just want a refresher course. Well, here’s where you are going to learn about how to create a web site, from the ground up, NO PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED. So strap in, and lets get cracking.
First off I would like to say that I am not some computer geek who was born writing code. In fact, I didn’t even have the first clue how to do much more than play games on a computer until a few years ago. So you don’t have to be some special breed of human to write a webpage, or do anything else for that matter.
What you’re going to need
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A computer (you had better have one if you’re reading this)
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A web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox (see above)
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A plain-text writer (notepad if you are using a windows works amazingly)
What you will need if you get more advanced
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A graphics Creation/Manipulation program
Lesson 1: What is HTML
“The longest journey is begun in a single step.” Lets take that single step. What is HTML? HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, which in english basically means a way of turning plain text into cool websites. HTML is NOT a programming language. HTML is a very simple (yet powerful) way of styling text and enhancing it.
To accomplish this mission HTML contains a series of “tags” which can be added to text to format them in special ways. These tags range from tags that create bold text, to tags that format the way text is laid out on the page.
Lesson 2: Your First Website
Yes, you read that right. Right now you are about to create your first website. So open up your plain-text writer and lets roll.
You should be looking at a totally blank new document ready for magic. Lets add that magic.
Imagine that creating a webpage is like writing a report. First, you need to get some paper.
In order to create a web page you have to first tell the computer that what it’s reading is supposed to be HTML, so that’s what we need to do. Type “<html>.” There, you just opened your first tag. Ever tag is enclosed in those little < > things. But opening a tag isn’t enough. You’ve got to tell the computer that the tag is also finished (computers are rather stupid). So go down a few lines and type “</html>. Every tag you create must have a closer (the same tag you opened with except with a “/” in front of it.
What you just did was tell the computer that everything between those two tags should be read like HTML and not like plain text. We have told the computer what paper to use. The next thing we need to do is give our report a title (and a header). So we need another set of tags.
Between the <html> and </html> Write “<head> </head>”. This tells the computer that between these two tags is the information about the page. Nothing you put between these tags will show up on the actual body of your page, but it is important nonetheless.
There are a ton of things that you can do with the header of a page, but the only thing we are going to do for now is give our page a title. To do this add “<title> </title>” between the <head> tags. Whatever goes inside of the <title> tags will appear in the browser as the title of the page (right up there on the top-most bar, on the left. So for our example write “Fuzzy Bunnies”.
Now we’ve come to one of the most important steps, saving your work. You don’t want the cat to come over and kill your computer before you saved. Saving an HTML file is a bit different than just saving a regular text file because you have to give it a special extension before the computer will be able to recognize it as something it should make a website out of. So instead of just saving it as the default “.txt” or whatever your program tries to save it as, click on the dropdown menu right below the place where you type in the file name, and select “all files”, then type whatever you want to in the name field, and add to the end “.html”. Save, and there you go. Your first html file.
But of course, you are not done. If you loaded the file you just saved in a web browser you wouldn’t see anything (except for the title in the title bar). That’s because we havn’t added anything to the body (or the actual page). We’ll get into that in Part 2…