Making a website - First Step Learn HTML!

To make your website on your own computer, you need to know HTML. All the web pages on the Internet, are fundamentally made up of HTML. To understand what I mean, go to any page of any website and go to “View > Source” in Internet Explorer or “View > Page Source” in Mozilla Firefox. (You can find “View” along with “File” “Edit” and all those other options on the top of your browser window.) A new window will open and what you will see is a confusing combination of words and brackets and a whole lot of other stuff! This is the HTML of the page.

Now, HTML is basically a language. If you know programming languages like C, C++, VB etc. then HTML will be very very easy for you. HTML, is one of the easiest programming languages. In fact HTML is not even a programming language.

HTML is a very simple “markup” language. This means that HTML decides how the different parts of the web page will “look”. HTML is all about how everything “looks”. For example, if I want this text to look bold. Then I can control how this text looks with HTML.

If you want a particular image on a web page in a particular place and of a particular size, you can decide exactly how it will look on the web page. Controlling the look of the web page is what HTML is all about.

Nowadays, the Internet is changing. Websites are not made only of HTML anymore. Websites are made using HTML, XHTML, Dynamic HTML, CSS, Flash, ASP and a whole lot of other things. To make a decent website you must know at least HTML and CSS.

Note: There are many ways of making a website without knowing anything about HTML or CSS. We will tell you some of them here. However, we are saying that you should know HTML because if you don’t, you will waste a lot of time and money doing something that is very simple. There are simpler ways of doing things if you know HTML.

If this does not make sense now, then just take our word for it. As you learn HTML, you will understand what we mean.

So since you are going to be learning HTML, let me give you the basics of HTML.




Basics of HTML
HTML is a very simple language. It’s all about “tags”.

What are tags?


Tags are the main part of HTML. Suppose you want to make some text look bold. You put the text between & tags. The "" & "" are the tags. is the starting tag. is the ending tag. The ending tag is exactly like the staring tag. The only difference is the “/”.

Anything that comes between these two will appear in bold on the web page. So suppose I want to write “You must learn HTML!” on the web page in bold. I would write:

You must learn HTML!


This probably gives you a basic understanding of tags. Just like there are tags to make text look bold, there are also many many other tags. There are tags to make text look italic, of a particular color, make text blink, make text scroll across the screen, make images show up and a whole lot of other things.

Just to give you an example, to make text bilk, you use the tags. It’s that simple!

These are the basics of HTML. There is a lot more to learn, and I am sure you have many questions in your mind. Don’t worry, we will help you with all of them. Here are some excellent resources where you can learn all about HTML:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/
http://www.utexas.edu/learn/html/

Just for fun you can try to see the “View > Source” and see if you can understand anything now.

In any case, you can come back to this page and learn HTML through the links we have given above a little later. For now, let us assume that you know HTML and move forward towards making your website..