Saturday, December 26, 2009

Using HTML Code to Build Your Website

Knowing a little about html code can be helpful when building your website even if you hire an expert to design your site. If you know some html code, you can make minor changes in the site instead of having to go back to the designer every time you want to make a change.

HTML stands for hypertext markup language and it is the language used to build a basic website. Knowledgeable web designers will use a more elaborate script that entails java script and cascading style sheets (CSS). If you are just starting to learn about building a website, start by learning html code.

A basic feature of html code is that for every tag that you add to start a command, you need an equal tag to stop. The tag to stop always has a slash before the command.

Here are some examples. Every page starts with the word body surrounded by these brackets < > and ends with /body surrounded by the same brackets. Remember to put the brackets around all tags.  If I do it in this blog, the words will just disappear.
center before and /center afterward centers your text on the page.

font face="Times New Roman" size="4"Example/font is the code for font face and size. You can insert your preference for font face. Keep the font face generic like Times New Roman, Verdana, Courier, or Arial because not everyone who visits your site will have all of the exotic fonts and it will just show up as one of the generic fonts anyway.
b /b is bold.
u /u is underline.
i /i is italics.
Remember to add brackets <> around these tags.
You need to tell the code that you want to go to the next line by typing br.
To make a new paragraph, type p.
To add an image, use this code, img src="Your image" width="number of pixels" height="number of pixels" border="0" alt="" /.
To add a link to another website, use this code.
a href="http://www.yoursite.com"Write text here  /a

To have control of the size of your webpage, you need to tell it how many pixels or inches wide you want it. Otherwise, the text will fill the monitor of each visitor and it will be difficult to read. An easy way to do this is by using a table. Here is some code for a simple table with two columns and two rows. The table is 800 pixels wide. Each cell of the table is between td and /td. tr /tr indicates a row. You can add text, images or even forms in the cell.

table width="800" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2" border="2"
tr
td /td
td /td
/tr
tr
td /td
td /td
/tr
/table
(Remember to bracket each tag < >.)

If you would like to practice using html code, you may start with a free download of the Coffee Cup or First Page html editor. If you want to purchase a good html editor, Dreamweaver is popular. However, it costs $400. I have been able to produce perfectly fine web pages using Coffee Cup.

You don’t need to remember all of the tags because the html editors allow you to push buttons to insert tags. Keep in mind that you will need to highlight the item you want to tag using your mouse before adding the tag so that it will be included in the tag.

These simple tags will get you started. You can get more in depth tutorials from the html editors themselves.

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