Open up notepad on your computer. This is the only software you will need to begin learning html.
A quick explanation of tags
Due to this article being hosted online I cant actual show you a tag as the webpage you are reading would make it invisible Tags begin with a "" symbol. For the purpose of this article I will replace these with the "[" and "]" symbols. Remember to always use the arrows though as the square brackets WILL NOT WORK.
A tag is a piece of html code used for formatting. You wont need to know much about them for now (they will be covered in another article), for now you just need to know that to add a tag you write
"[tagname] insert what you want formatted here [/ tagname]"
The "[/ tagname]" part stops all following text / other content from being formatted in the same way.
This, as I said, is not very important for now.
What comes first? …
Well you cant get much more to the point than that. "[html]" comes first. Every html document starts with it and ends with the tag "[/ html]".
Easy right? so what we have so far is a text document that reads;
[html]
[/ html]
Now save your document as "index.html" and open it up in a browser. A large blank white page appears.
Now lets fill in that blank space …
Everything that makes up your webpage goes between the "[html] [/ html]" tags. But the actual text or content goes between two other tags, "[body] [/ body]". Notice how tags must have a beginning and an end, the end is shown by the / character. Type this new tag into your text document …
[html]
[body] Put your message here [/ body]
[/ html]
Now type in a message in between the "[body]" tags. It can be whatever you want. Any message you can think of. It should be placed to replace "Put your message here" in the example above.
Save to index.html again like before and open it in your browser. You should now see a white screen with your message displayed in the top left corner.
What to do next …
If you like you can now upload this file to a webhost, many free ones are available if you search the internet. An then you will have a website for yourself … Well … not really. Its just one page after-all. We will cover how to add more pages and better content to your website in another article. For now, play around with this and be proud that you are on your way to learning html.
