In this, the second, in a series of occasional articles about building your own simpleweb page, I want to explain about Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).
What you see when you use your browser to view a web site is the result of thatbrowser interpreting the document that someone has written. To do this the browseruses a simple set of codes called tags that were invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. These codes are calledHTML, and are now a standard administered by The World Wide Web Consortium(W3C).
Like all standards not everyone (including me) follow them. As anyone who hassurfed the web can tell you, some pages just don’t look right in some browsers. Thisis a shame as W3C go to a lot of troubleto ensure that the standards are available to all and can be adhered to.
The first thing you need to create your page is an editor. There are many availableand they range from expensive What You See Is What You Get (WYSISYG) editorslike Microsoft’s FrontPage orMacromedia’s Dreamweaver to freewareWYSIWYGs like CoffeeCup. Youdon’t need a WYSISYG editor, in fact I would recommend that to start with you use anormal text editor. You can use Notepad, it comes with Windows. For an example ofwhat you can do with Notepad visit rowlandweb and theirNotepad page.
I prefer to use a text editor that has been designed to highlight the HTML tags andprovide other nifty features to help code your web page. Take a look at
Once you have your editor you must learn HTML. This is possible very quickly andeasily from the following sites
While you are writing the page Idocs or Barebones can provide a good online reference.
Now before you start coding you need to have a sense of style. Whilst all those fancyHTML tags might look to be an extremely good idea they can be very annoying to aviewer of your page. There are several sites that can teach you “HTML style”,including one from the master himself, Berners-Lee,, or Jay from Hawaii. Jakob Nielsen haswritten two pages detailing the top ten mistakes in web design at 1, 2.
To show you how easy this all is I have coded a page. This is a very simple pageincluding a graphic and two links, one within the site and one to another web site. Icoded it all “by hand” using a text editor.
Now that you have your page ready you are going to need to unload it to the host thatyou chose from my last article. You will have to wait until the next time I visit thissubject for that information.
Site Of The Week
John from Upper Hutt sent me this site.An amazing site for all news junkies. The news has been split into 10 major headingsand each heading has many sub-headings. There is regional news from the fourcorners of the world, and if you are a soccer fan you will be delighted by theircoverage segregated by English team, division, league, and they even cover Europeansoccer.
